Standing on the Outside: A Reflection on Loneliness, Purpose, and the People We Choose

23 Nov

There’s a quote often attributed to Robin Williams:

“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing is to end up with people who make you feel alone.”

I don’t feel lonely. I think there’s a profound difference between feeling on the outside and feeling lonely. The interesting thing is that I probably remember that quotation from as early as my late teens or possibly my early twenties, and it has stayed somewhere in my mind ever since.

I think we go through different phases of life. We have an ascension phase where we’re growing up and learning our place in the world and what we’re doing. Maybe that’s our job or college education, finding what we feel is our place within reality as we perceive it.

Then there’s a collision phase where something doesn’t turn out to be the way you thought it would and your world is upended in some way. There’s a very broad scale of how that can happen to people. Sometimes it could be that you become the centre of town gossip and other times it can be as dramatic as your entire family being killed in a car accident or losing somebody you love to something like cancer. But this collision phase is something that stops you dead in your tracks and completely upends the world as you understood it.

Usually you then enter a phase of loneliness as you rebuild yourself, recalibrate, reload and re-engage with the situation and the hand that life has dealt you. Some people don’t make it out of this, but I think to some degree, whether it’s a one or a ten on that scale, whatever version of it you go through, we all end up in that lonely phase.

It’s where you’ve outgrown where you were, for whatever circumstances better or worse that forced that sense of growth, but you haven’t yet grown into where you’re going to be. That’s what standing on the outside is to me. That’s why you can have people around you and still feel lonely.

And then of course, if you can endure and grow during that lonely phase of your life, you enter what I would call the legacy phase. That’s where you start thinking about the bigger picture and not just your own part in it. What comes after you? Your children, your grandchildren, what are you leaving behind? There’s an old idea that it’s a tragedy to leave this world before you’ve made your major contribution, and I think there’s something worth considering in that. Being Alone and Needing People

With regards to being alone versus needing people, we are by nature enormously social creatures. Even if we look at some of the most terrible human beings on the planet in supermax prisons, people society categorises as the worst among us, one of the greatest punishments we can impose is solitary confinement.

So we obviously need people around us. But there’s a lot to be said for the expression, create your environment and then let your environment create you. I think all too often that need to be social can drive us to surround ourselves with people and environments that are not necessarily conducive to the best outcome or the life that we’re trying to build.

During these periods of life I think it’s important to learn to be comfortable being alone when those moments descend upon us. Not because the goal is isolation, but because you need to be capable of staying the course towards where you need to go and not drift off course because you’re being pulled by unnecessary distractions simply because you don’t want to be by yourself.

I touched on this earlier, but the idea of being in between is something I think we see particularly around our teenage years and early adulthood. I can certainly remember this for myself. You leave the phase of life where you’re going out on weekends and partying and getting up to all sorts, and at some point it no longer interests you in the same way.

Maybe now you’re thinking more about building a life with someone, building a home, becoming almost a disciple of discipline or becoming extremely dedicated to some passion or hobby. Suddenly you realise you just don’t have enough hours in the week to waste on things that have become trivial to you.

I guess the more you learn about yourself, the more obvious it becomes what actually is trivial. You categorise your priorities until sometimes you outgrow one set of friends, circumstances or a particular way of living, but you haven’t yet arrived at the point in your life where you meet the people further down that road who have a similar mindset.

That’s the in-between.

Orientation and Reality

I often talk about the fact that farriery, forging and martial arts provide certain axioms of living in the sense of giving me orientation. The reason I think that translates appropriately into ordinary social life is because those disciplines teach you to confront reality the way it is rather than the way you wish it to be.

And I think that’s important socially too. As long as you keep aiming upward towards the truth and the highest form of responsibility that you feel you can adopt, it becomes more obvious, if you’re willing to listen, what is good for you in your social life and what isn’t.

Another way I sometimes position that question in my mind is to imagine your life is a movie and an audience is watching whatever juncture you currently find yourself at. What would the audience be screaming at you to do at this point in the movie?

Maybe it’s take the job. Leave the job. Move to another country. Stay where you are. Wait for someone or stop waiting and move on. Those are only examples, but whatever the situation is, imagine what the audience would be shouting at the top of their voices as the obvious thing you’re refusing to see.

There’s a fair chance that’s at least something you need to look at.

When You Become the Problem Solver

On my own tendency to become the problem solver, I think it shows up most when I reach those junctures in life.

I often take longer than I should to make a decision because I’m trying to solve a problem for somebody else. I’m hoping that person gets to the place I wish them to be at because I can see the potential of what we could do together, whether that person is a business partner, family member, friend or anybody else.

But there comes a time when you realise that you can’t want the best for somebody more than they want it for themselves. You can’t solve the situations other people find themselves in, and you can’t want to change their situation more than they want to change it. What I’ve had to learn is to see more clearly the line where my responsibility for somebody else ends and where their responsibility for themselves begins.

That isn’t necessarily easy, especially when you care about the person.

Reality Eventually Gets a Vote

Reality eventually gets a vote circles back to things I’ve said repeatedly in martial arts. You can have an idea in your head about how you block a punch, but if it isn’t effective and you get punched in the face, you can try and convince somebody that it was all part of your plan and you meant for that to happen. But everybody sees reality for what it is and, more importantly, you feel it yourself. You know you have to take another look at the situation and re-engage more effectively.

We can do the same thing in ordinary life. Certain decisions might yield results in the short term and allow you to convince yourself everything is fine, but that doesn’t mean the underlying problem isn’t still there.

It’s like when you shoe a horse. If the hoof balance isn’t correct you may not notice some dramatic consequence immediately after doing the work. But as that hoof grows over the next eight weeks, that imbalance proportionately grows and eventually shows itself. You can’t hide what you see eight weeks later just because everything looked acceptable on the day.

I think life has a habit of doing the same thing.

Easy Happiness and Hard-Won Peace

I’m actually not sure easy happiness is the right way to describe this because you’re not necessarily happy. What I mean is avoiding doing the hard work in the place where you already know you need to do it.

We all know whatever that stupid thing is that we’re doing that we probably shouldn’t be doing. We’re generally not left short of imagining what our weaknesses are or how we could improve ourselves. But there are plenty of situations where we choose not to go there because addressing them is hard, so we put it off.

That’s what I mean by the short-term easy part. The problem is that we know we’re putting it off. We know there’s a whole range of things being swept under the rug and over enough time those things accumulate until there’s no longer room under the rug.

That’s when you wake up at three in the morning asking yourself, why the hell am I doing this? Or why am I not doing that?

Over the long term I don’t think you have peace of mind unless you address those things. Addressing them is uncomfortable in the short term, but that’s what I mean by hard-won peace. At the end you can look at yourself in the mirror and feel some pride in yourself. You have a sense of integrity from doing today what you know needs to be done so that tomorrow you have something you didn’t have before.

In this case I’m not talking about money or possessions. I’m talking about integrity, self-respect and a certain freedom over your own mind and conscience.

When Battle Mode Becomes Normal

Speaking for myself personally, battle mode comes from spending long periods in high-pressure situations. Personal conflicts. Family conflicts. Work and commercial conflicts. And in my case conflict with the state at one of the highest levels I’ve experienced.

You enter a kind of survival mode and get used to dealing with chaos. The objective is always to put order into that chaos and you’re continuously problem solving, but when you get no respite from it, eventually the chaos itself starts to become your idea of normality.

Then when you finally solve the problem and put things into some kind of order, even though that order may not last forever, something strange can happen. Peace descends on you for a while but it can actually be difficult to enjoy it and simply be present because you’ve spent so long living in a state where what should have been abnormal became normal to you.

And I guess my own pathway has filled many of those quiet periods, or rather it hasn’t allowed me to have many quiet periods. I went to the French Foreign Legion to recalibrate my life. I had to deal with courtrooms and a court case. I rebuilt my life, changed careers and started over again as a farrier. All of those things were extremely demanding in different ways. So when things finally become quiet, sometimes quiet itself takes some getting used to.

Peers Rather Than Projects

When it comes to peers versus projects, I guess when you look at someone only in terms of what they can become, you miss who they are in the present. That’s an error because you’re forever trying to deal with their future self and not who they actually are right now.

And actually, I never thought about this until now, but there’s also the pressure that puts on the other person. Even though from my perspective I’m wanting something good for them, it’s funny because it’s only struck me now as I’m thinking about it, but it echoes that old expression that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Even though the intentions might be good, in a strange way it can become a form of tyranny over the other person. You’re looking at them through some ideal image you’ve conjured up in your imagination and then inadvertently punishing them for failing to match it.

It’s not that they can’t become that person. Maybe they can. But they need the time to get there themselves. I guess my own problem is impatience and wanting to accelerate that timeline.

And that isn’t really my timeline to accelerate.

Why This Belongs on Forge and Farrier

With regards to the different things I cover on Forge and Farrier, even though it’s meant to be primarily about horseshoes, craftsmanship and martial arts, writing like this feels like a natural by-product of those disciplines.

They’re continuous compasses that force a person to orientate and confront reality because none of them have a finish line of completion or perfection. There’s forever room for me, or anybody practising these disciplines, to improve. And you can’t honestly improve if you aren’t willing to honestly self-reflect.

That’s probably why the writing wanders into subjects that at first glance don’t appear to have very much to do with forging a horseshoe or practising martial arts. For me they’re coming from the same place.

Being Between Chapters

Being between chapters, Abraham and putting order into chaos are all connected in my mind.

What I mean by all of this is that sometimes in the transitions of life, standing on the outside and being in between means you’re in the present-day transition from one part of your life to another. You recognise the chaos and you’re trying to put it into order, and what you essentially step out onto the hero’s journey.

That’s the story of Abraham. Long story short, Abraham is effectively told that if he leaves the comfort of his father’s house and steps out into the world, he’ll have the adventure of his life. But of course we know that he endures an enormous amount of suffering on that journey.

With great positioning comes great sacrifice.

And it’s not a one-time hero story with a happily-ever-after ending either. That’s probably the part that matters. Life doesn’t seem to work like that. You don’t conquer chaos once, put everything neatly into order and then spend the rest of your life sitting comfortably inside the answer.

There’s always another transition.