22 Days

So, having made a blog post only a few hours ago, I stayed up late chatting with a friend (yes, THAT friend).  We were both watching CNN while chatting, and laughing at President Obama’s half-brother, Mark Obama Ndesandjo, who would not answer Larry King’s questions and instead kept going on and on and on about his novel.  He seemed so arrogant, talking about how his novel has themes that will resonate the world over, how much of it was autobiographical, etc., when King wanted to talk about the President.  I thought about how sad it was that this guy believed he was on Larry King because he wrote a book, as if that’s more important than his insights on the President–at least to everyone except him and maybe his publisher–but maybe not.

And I’m just as bad.  How many pages of this blog have I filled with whining about myself, how depressed I am, how my friends aren’t giving me enough of their time, how my sensei has mistreated me?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sitting alone in restaurants, reading a book called Loneliness.  The conclusion was this:  Being lonely is like being hungry.  But you can’t ask people to feed you.  Instead, you have to feed other people.  The cure for loneliness is to turn your focus outward.

So I’m going to stop whining.  For the next three weeks, whenever I post to this blog, it will be with the idea that what I’m writing might help someone else who is having a hard time in life, someone who is depressed or lonely or grieving a death or just having to relocate and leave friends and familiar places behind.

And here’s the first of these posts, offered in the hope of feeding someone else:  The author of the book also discusses one of the reasons why so many of us are lonely–mobility.  We go off to school, join the military and move overseas, let our companies transfer us from one state to another in order to gain experience.  As a result, we don’t have any longstanding friends, people we’ve lived next to all our lives.  We sit in our houses in the center of a manicured lawn in some suburb that looks like every other suburb in every other city, and we wonder why we don’t have friends.  We decide that all we need are our spouses.  We make our spouses into our best friends and convince ourselves that we don’t need anyone else.  That makes for a happy marriage–I was very happy with this arrangement for more than 25 years.

But then our spouses die, and we find we have no one.  I have discovered from personal experience that the time to find good friends who will help you through the weeks and months that follow is BEFORE your spouse dies.

Start now.  Find the friends that will help you when you lose your other half.  Be that friend.  Eventually, half of every married couple is going to need good friends.  Don’t wait, because you can’t know which of you will die first or when.  Plan ahead.

Just a little food for thought.