Thoughts on ‘going it alone’
A strange thing happened to me on my way back from Bourke the other day.
There’s a stretch of road between Bourke and Nyngan that is dead straight and about 200 kms long. It’s one of the few roads around here where it’s a serious challenge to stay focused. The bitumen just keeps rolling out in front and there is little to distract you from a sense of aloneness under a vast, blue sky. Pulled over on the side of the road, the silence is deafening.
Having stopped for a break, I walked the edge of the road for a bit and watched some emu poke along the fence line that separates the Long Paddock from private land. I remembered stories I’ve been told about wild pigs and how they can “rip ya leg off.” I thought about snakes and felt the huge relief that comes from knowing it’s too cold for the blighters this time of year.
Like a city slicker gone bush, I thought about other deadly things that might be lurking in the undergrowth and then, for a minute or two, I didn’t think. I didn’t think at all.
Only distant bird calls disturbed the quiet for me and – except for the sad remains of some recent roadkill – I knew I was out there on my own.
I’ve always been a bit of a determined individual. Like so many others, I like my independence. I don’t mind ‘going it alone’. Suddenly though, in the isolation of that roadside stop, I got it.
As individual people, we aren’t separate from others in the way that some might want to think of themselves. We’re just not. We belong utterly to one another. We don’t ‘go it alone.’
Life is not so much a private matter - it’s a relational one. It might just be that freedom and happiness is tied up with a readiness, a willingness, to be open to the fact of our mutual connectedness. The mystery of life points to our absolute relatedness, to our utter connectedness to each and every human being.
Life in the bustling city, with its apparent emphasis on hyper-individualism, amid the crush of people, hits a paradox in the silence and aloneness of the Long Paddock. Life is a relationship itself. Everything is connected to everything else. To know that, is to be awake, it is to be set free to live fully alive.
Life is seriously radical. Sometimes it takes a stretch in the Long Paddock (however we might experience that quiet, reflective time) to remember the things that matter and climb over the things that don’t.
One of the lessons from the Long Paddock may well be a willingness to slow down long enough to feel how truly awesome it is to know we belong together and how truly ludicrous it is to even want to ‘go it alone’ at all.