Selectively Social
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | No Comments
It’s always been a balancing act for me — the decision to be social, to be out and about in society as a greater whole, to mix and mingle with all and sundry. I have decided over the past couple of years that being true to myself regarding these issues instead of allowing myself to be jollied-along with the crowd (ho-ho-ho-what-fun-we’ll-all-have!) is a much wiser choice than to force myself into activities that I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever.
Ah, I’m getting a bit hermit-like then, eh? Well, actually no — I’m not. Both individually and as a couple, we have plenty of social outings each month, but they are done with intent and thus with joy.
My social patterns seem to be a source of curiosity though and are frequently commented on. There have always been people in my life who don’t understand my desire for solitude and wonder why I feel compelled to limit my exposure to crowds and throngs or random encounters. I have never felt the necessity to pop into the village for pointless errands just so I could see someone other than the husband throughout the day. But does that make me eccentric?
This could potentially be the beginning of an essay or two on the joys of solitude and I shall begin by recounting a story from two decades ago.
I was travelling on a train in Europe and I had just left Vienna and was headed for Venice. Happily traipsing around the Continent all by myself, I had never felt miserable or sad or in any way diminished by the lack of a travel partner. On the contrary, I had no one but myself to answer to schedule wise and I hopped on and off of trains in various countries as I saw fit, with no fixed plans, and there was no one else to insist that we go out and get a proper dinner at night if all I wanted to do was sit in the hotel room, decompress, write in my journal, and eat cheese and fruit. I’d been having a delightful time and wasn’t fretting about anything.
But then the retirement aged American couple sat down across from me in the first-class dining car and proceeded to grill me during the entire meal about WHY did I want to travel alone and the woman ended up by pronouncing quite firmly that there was something “not quite right” about wanting to travel around solo without (option #1) a MAN to keep me safe or (option #2) a girlfriend to prevent me from being accosted by “foreign men” who might have dastardly ideas in mind. You would have thought it was 1959 — not 1989!
Carefully prying myself loose as the train arrived in Venice, I waved off their invitation to dinner and made my way to my hotel on the Grand Canal where I had a room with a view overlooking that mosquito filled waterway. I sat in the window composing shot after shot through the viewfinder of my camera and was grateful for the silence.
Nothing has really changed in my life. I do my best writing when I am undisturbed and my best artwork when my flow will not be interrupted. Over the years I have often wondered how some people of an artistic nature — other writers, other painters — manage to ever get any work done at all when they are spending so much time in daily or almost daily social interaction. They must be far better than I at multi-tasking and I actually do not envy them that level of juggling. Just being a wife and a partner in my husband’s business in addition to being a writer and artist requires quite enough juggling, thank you very much.
I choose my moments for being social and anyone who truly knows me will recognise the difference in my appearance immediately. When I am in a quiet space of contemplative solitude, the light is on in my eyes — but there is also a lot going on behind those eyes. When I am in a social mindset, the light is on in my whole face.
No, I am not hermetic — but I am, both by inclination and necessity, selective with my time and creative energy. And hermetic versus selective are two rather different states of being.
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Deborah Harmes, Ph.D.
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