Solitude, Self and Where it is Leading Me

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of being alone. I am sure that moving to a new city, leaving a relationship and starting my residency are the main reasons this topic has been so close lately, but it is a topic I have spent time thinking about my entire life. I was an only child, my family moved a LOT and I went to a new school every year (until I quit in the 10th grade). I always started as the outsider new kid, trying to make new friends, just to leave them again at the end of the year. As I grew older I retained many of these patterns. I can identify a few times in my life where I have truly experienced real solitude for periods of time and it is interesting the different effects it has had on me and my views. I also realize that when I was younger I seemed to associate solitude only with remote places and did not realize the solitude that was created around me by many of my choices. In my early thirties I found some stability in my life and some close friends and now see I never realized the depth of the roots that were spreading.

Last night I was "post-call" from the CCU (Cardiac or Coronary Care Unit, a type of ICU) and after being awake for 32 hours with critically ill patients I decided a 2-3 hour nap would be in order. I awoke as usual, groggy and in a semi-delirious state but feeling my brain could at least attain minimal functions again. I usually plan a low stress activity for the evening of my post call days, dinner out or perhaps a DVD. Last night I went to see a new movie I have been anticipating for a while, "Moon" (here is an NPR article on Moon and here is the Movie Trailer). It explored many of these themes that have rattled around in my brain in various ways. I realize that the suggestible state my sleep deprivation put me in allowed the movie to plant deep seeds that resulted in dreams all night, so now it is morning and with a cup of tea I am trying to think a bit about them...

One of my first memorable experiences of solitude was as child of perhaps 9 or 10. I can't remember when exactly, but I was in Arizona and I was living with my mother and a guy she was with at the time in a small run-down trailer park filled mostly with odd ball retired folk from what I remember. I would occasionally play horseshoes with one of the tenants, but usually was left to entertaining myself. The temperatures were usually over 90-100 degrees and the landscape mostly rocks, dirt and cactus. I spent the days exploring what there was to explore and catching lizards in the empty lots around the park. One day I remember waking up aking in the sun with a bloody rock near my head and a feeling not much different from what I feel like after a 32-hour call shift now. I wandered into a local convenience store with crusted blood on my face and told them I needed to use a phone. I remember the look on their faces . . . they were almost scared to talk to me. I thought nothing of it, I took the dime they handed me and called my mom who eventually came to pick me up, giving me glasses of salty water to drink. (smart thinking mom, just add a teaspoon of sugar and you made re-hydration formula!). I evidently had heat stroke out in the desert somewhere, passed out and hit my head on a rock and luckily woke up at some point...

Having hundreds upon hundreds of days like this growing up, hours spent by myself trying to create whatever interactive activity I could with the inanimate world around me allowed me time to reflect on more than I realized at the time. I developed so much of my identity around being self-sufficient & alone but at the same time found a true reward in the creative side of my personality. The more creative and ingenious I was the less alone I felt and the better time I had rummaging around the world around me. I remember developing a fondness in my twenties for these lonely, empty places because they felt like familiar in some way. I spent months alone every summer in my beat up old 1988 Subaru GL-10 Turbo Wagon (a car I dearly loved!) driving the back roads looking for the emptiest places I could find, the abandoned places. I would live on the road, camping out of the car and I would take my 4x5 view camera or pocket-sized Leica M6 and photograph them, record them, so that they did not go unnoticed.

One of my favorite activities was to take my BMW K100RS, load up my cameras and start looking for abandoned old highways, closed off, and drive the lengths of them to see the small towns or homes had withered along side them after the pipeline that fed them had been amputated. I was surprised how many old highways there were that in the 60's were left behind when technology allowed us to blast through mountains and hills and make straighter, faster roads. These old highways seemed to talk to me of the memories they held of the lives that traveled along them. I felt back then it was almost my duty to find these places and appreciate them.

I remember finding one old farmhouse with a sign pounded into the post out front about bank foreclosure. Walking across the broken entry the wind wound through the rooms through the broken windows causing the old wallpaper to flap back and forth. The floorboards creaked and the crooked walls threatened to fall in, but there was enough left over that you could see the life that once occupied it. Outside, near the barn, was the remnants of a small garden less that 10 feet long. It was bordered with smooth rocks nearly lost in the soil now which struck me because there was not a smooth rock to be found anywhere in the fields surrounding it. There was a small path that had been worn from the back kitchen door that despite the many years that had passed was still visible. I could not help but think of the person that made that trip from the kitchen perhaps once or twice a day to care for that garden, plant it, weed it... now gone.

Another striking find required a bit more of a possibly criminal activity. This house was not along an abandoned road, but the trees and blackberry bushes that had overgrown it made it hardly noticeable from the small road that still passed nearby. If you were not looking, you would have not seen it. I pulled off down the road and walked back up to it with my cameras and once I made my way through some blackberry bushes and shrubs found a door ajar in the back and I went in. This house had not been empty for as long, perhaps 5-10 years. The curtains that were closed were rotting off the rods and the moisture was eating through the floorboards making the floor soft in places, yet the furniture was still mostly intact and the house was sitting exactly as it had been left. I could not help but explore this place to get some clues as to why it all suddenly stopped and froze as if someone was supposed to be coming home but never did. The clues slowly pieced together the picture. Near a large chair in the living room was an aluminum TV tray covered in medication bottles. I wish I had my medical training then that I have now so understand what they were suffering from by reading the drug names on the bottles. There were stacks of old magazines nearby and it was obvious that this was the main location of the resident for the last days or months. It faced an old cathode ray TV on a rickety stand and was pretty much the focus of the room. The rest of the house was mostly empty, there was an old bed in one room and a kitchen filled with boxed foods and canned meals in the cupboard. Obviously this person sustained on what could be warmed rather than cooked near the end. Somehow you could see the paths in the house that this person traveled, from the bed to the kitchen table to the living room chair. All that was not necessary to sustain this simple existence was left in piles alongside. I could not help but realize this was the echo of a life that had given up. Someone that woke each day, somewhat disappointed that morning came, and trudged through the activities that would bring them back to night again so that they could close their eyes again. What really made it all clear though, and personal and real, was the discovery of a drawer of Hallmark cards and letters in the kitchen. They had stamps with postage dates and when correlated with the dates on newspapers and medication bottles, it was clear that two years previous this man's wife had died. There were letters expressing sadness and offering help, but it seems this man did want to accept those offers. It appeared he had lost whatever made his life worth living as well and simply counted the days until he could stop breathing and join her. I later saw this first hand as an EMT. People counting the days until their lungs finally filled with fluid after their heart was no longer up to the task of pumping it around, they called 911 and we arrived. We gathered them on a gurney and shut the door for the last time, leaving the house for empty while the soul occupying it spent their last few breaths in the ambulance or the hospital that they arrived at. I had stumbled onto the shell that was left behind that day and spent hours just witnessing it all....

Last night's movie "Moon" was great in that it spent 2 hours on many of these very themes. Solitude. Isolation. Death. Life. Even when the main character finds what you might expect to be the perfect companion (I won't allude to more for fear of spoiling it), someone that would truly understand your every thought and react the same to every event... someone with the same feelings and even the same memories, the sense of solitude was still profound, perhaps more-so, because he realizes that he will not be able to escape from the fact that he will die alone. No matter how close another human or any companion, even a computer in this story, can be... no matter how much you want to connect to those things around you he realizes that we truly are alone. Then, at the end, it is almost as if this realization brings some peace because he realizes it is the one thing that all living creatures share, their individuality along with it their solitude. It is a sad and beautiful movie, innocent in some way, which truly shows that no matter how many times you tell the same story, certain themes ring true. This is a theme explored many times in many genres from film to books to art yet every time it is viewed it feels compelling. I think that is because it is true and we all recognize truth in some deep place within.

So this piece of writing continues to grow and as usual, I just don't know were to stop it because I have so much more to say about it.... about my experiences in Antarctica out wandering alone under the sunlit 3am sky with my camera and the sense of true isolation I felt as well as the peace. Camping alone on the tops of mountains. Probably my most meaningful experience with solitude was working as an astronomer in New Mexico. This happened twice, the first time for a year.

I left Seattle to move to the Sacramento Mountains where a stellar observatory under construction, the main telescope was operational and my job was to run it at night while living in a nearby home leftover from an old Air Force base that still had a skeleton operation nearby. There were people there, I was not totally alone, but since the rest of the observatory was still under construction the crew was pretty much there only during the day and I would arrive right when they all left for the 30-40 minute drive to their homes for the night. We would say hello in passing and I would go about my business preparing the telescope for the night's work. I would walk through the entire facility checking things before we would power up and this took some time since the telescope this all housed and supported was quite large. I would open the dome at sunset and spend a few moments watching the colors of the sky change over the desert valley 5000 feet below. We were located at almost 9000 feet and the sky here was dark and clear when the light finally faded. After filling the instruments with the liquid nitrogen that would keep their detectors at a temperature of −321 °F I would settle myself into a control room chair. This room filled with computer screens and not much else and I would begin the tasks of focusing and observing the night's stellar targets, recording all the data on spinning hard drives in a nearby computer room. When things were running smoothly I had a lot of time to read my books or wander just outside under the cold, crystal clear sky. There were no other human voices, no sounds other than the occasional creak of the machinery as the telescope adjusted to a new position. I would sometimes bring my cello in an practice.

This went on, night after night, for a year. What is funny is that in a life surrounded by technology, it was the first time my entire day and night were dictated by nature. The rising and setting of the sun was what determined when I woke, slept or worked. The moon, whether it was full or new, determined what kind of work we were able to do. I felt a peace I have not felt before and not since in many ways. I make it sound as if I was very happy during this time but that is only now that I am looking back on it. This was the first time I had left a place that I had lived for many years, Seattle, and the first time I had close friends to leave behind. At first I was very lonely and tried to fly back to Seattle often to see people. Eventually, I settled into the routine and found more and more enjoyment in my old activities of solitude such as hiking, biking and hunting mushrooms in the woods around us or taking photos of the details that caught my eye. I loved sitting for hours without saying a word, only observing what was around me and being aware of the thoughts and feelings that they would stimulate. I clearly remember some winter nights when I could just sit and listen to the distant sounds of elk bugling and rattling their antlers in competition for a mate. It was beautiful in its own way....

After a year of this solitary introspection I was aware that this was not enough for me, this science and technology, and I returned to Seattle with the idea of studying philosophy. This was short lived and I soon realized philosophy is just about the same as physics, lots of mental thoughts focused on unraveling a puzzle or proving a point, but at the end of the day you were no more than you were when you started and sometimes you even felt as if you were less.... so I returned to the observatory, this time for two years. In that time I learned the value of simple things. The observatory was larger now with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey up and running and I was rarely totally alone. I focused on my health, trail running and a new volunteer activity, Emergency Medical Services... I became and EMT and eventually ran our small rural volunteer EMS department. Working in medicine, in Emergency Medicine specifically, opened a door that joined two very fundamental aspects of who I had learned I was. Someone with a strong need to mentally understand the world around him yet someone not totally happy with the mathematics and the science, but someone that needed to understand the meaning of what was transpiring. Someone that looked for the beauty and deeper impact of the events around him. I was not happy in science. I could not totally immerse myself in nature. I needed a blending of the two and medicine sparked something that had long lay dormant in me. It was this experience as an EMT that eventually led me to medicine. Not since I came to Seattle in the early 1990's with hopes of attaining and Astronautical engineering degree and becoming an astronaut had I felt close to something that spoke to me and challenged me.

Now that I am in medicine, day and night, I see more and more how this experience brings me closer to people and separates me from them. Humans live within a comfortable sphere of existence mostly. The sphere encompasses the daily activities of community, gathering food, working, etc... There are ideas, concepts and realities bigger than this daily routine that we occasionally glimpse or are touched by. The birth of a child, the death of a grandparent, the news story of some horrendous war. The large majority of the world only touches these things briefly. Although aware of the things that these events represent, it is not the focus of most peoples lives and for good reason. The truth could paralyze many people I think, the endless dwelling on our own mortality. I think this is what drives religion, the need to be comforted in the face of the truth of our corporeal life. The fact that we are all mortal and individual in this world, we own nothing and we control nothing. We participate and witness and experience but do not truly create or control. This is not meant to be a dark vision of the world but it is does open the door to true appreciation if looked at the right way. I think that it can be troubling to most to center on these thoughts though. As a species we concern ourselves with living from day to day and we focus on the center, not the fringes of this life. But I do think we all need to know that what is outside this existence if being explored, being touched somehow and we select people to fill those roles. Astronauts leave our planet and go into space to see what lies beyond our small physical lives here. Others focus on the spiritual aspects of life beyond, whether they are priests or monks or philosophers. We set aside a group of people to deal with the ugliness of war, as soldiers, they are given the authority to carry horrendous acts that we would condemn within the safer confines of our comfortable world in order to protect this bubble. These people gain some knowledge of what is beyond our daily world and as such, hold special places in our society but also carry special burdens. I have found in later reading how similar these thoughts are to Joseph Campbell's concepts of the monomyth in many ways.

As a physician I see that every day I spend in an ICU inserting wires into people's hearts or filling their veins with physiology altering drugs that we are given authority, by the community around us, to live in that border between life and death of the body. To be the contact point between this life and what lies beyond our eventual death. We live surrounded by it. We cut into people's skin with scalpels and we are allowed this power by those around us who expect that in return we guard this boundary and assist with those that need to venture near it or over it when the time comes. Every day I come closer to the truths of our physical existence as I become more a doctor and less a citizen - and I think this is exactly what happens to us. It happens to monks and soldiers and all that agree to fill the role of the "border walker", someone that exists between what is known and what is not, existing in both worlds but living in neither. As a physician I no longer fit or feel part of the normal daily world around me exactly but not apart from it either. I am immersed in it but as if on some slightly different wavelength. The intimate knowledge of life and death gives physicians a special role within society but it is also a terrible loss of innocence in many ways. I see now how this life I have chosen yet again reinforces a theme of solitude in my life yet fills a need I have always seemed to have. . . or perhaps a need I learned to have.

I would not give it up. I would go into space today to live for 20 years on some remote space station if they offered it to me. I will continue to venture further into medicine as I train and live in the places it takes me. All the time I look back at the community of people I feel that I am leaving behind in some way with a sense of longing - wanting to be wholly part of the group, to not live in between, but I know that it not possible. I turned 39 years old this week, probably half way through this life of mine. I hope only that as the years pass I become more fluid, more peaceful with the role I have chosen for myself and the role that I play in other people's lives. I may always long for the things that I have given up in the choices I have made and for the innocence that is lost with every new piece of knowledge or experience gained, but at the same time I hope that I will eventually feel the peace that most of the characters in the stories dealing with this sort of solitude often seem to find. The acceptance that the world as it is and the role that we fill in it. That is enough . . . they stop fighting against the injustice and the fear and you feel the sense of peace about them finally.