By Rawlins Gilliland
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-891241.mp3
Dallas, TX –
INTRO: Some might consider a life lived alone as unfulfilled, but commentator Rawlins Gilliland isn't so sure.
COMMENTARY: There's a wetland area nestled into the forest behind my house. Rainy swamp or sunshine, it's a place I routinely go to be alone. Not to be confused with lonely.
Spending time alone is something many of us not only need, it's something valuable we do. Pertinent to life at large, I wonder how anyone can become "whole" with someone else when they've never been wholly alone with themselves without feeling lonely.
I thought about this yesterday as I watched the solitary swan that has inexplicably lived for years on an inland pond adjacent to the creek. Each visit, I'm touched; his life striking me as sad since he is never with his own. But how am I to know that he doesn't think the same of me? He cannot be aware that gregarious human loners may actively seek the company of others while mandating important time and space alone.
We Homo sapiens idealize matrimonial bonding. The flip side of this sometimes grim fairy tale is that swans actually are genetically wired rather than culturally programmed to monogamously mate for life. So how could I not wonder about his apparent exile, shunned by the ducks and geese, always standing out but never fitting in. Alone.
Watching the swan swim in graceful silence, I've reflected upon this dichotomy; the under-recognized need to self-discover and regenerate alone vs. our fixated emphasis on joined-at-the-hip coupling. I've been more or less betrothed more than once. And in the best of times I marveled at how lonely being single seemed in hindsight. But in the down times when love has waned and the emotional glue no longer holds , I felt lonelier than any isolation chamber inmate. Conversely, I relish the single life until the sensuous pride of introspection feeds upon itself.
Who doesn't admire great marriages where love looks like guileless children swimming nude in warm water? But too often I recognize enabling alliances where partners blame each other for denied adventure or thwarted ambitions. I remind these defeatists that theirs was not an arranged marriage. That however difficult, ample options to exit exist. Instead they stay, willing to face what I, and I suspect that swan, know to be the fiercest loneliness of all; remaining with someone you cannot love for fear of being alone.
I was pondering such things this morning when I discovered - on the pond's shore while walking in the thawing mist - that, during the night, my regal friend the swan had died. Recognizing that he lost his life alone, I wondered if, true to his species code, he had ever actually mated for life and if so, had he somehow tragically lost his other half? Perhaps here as elsewhere, nature's doom was being deemed a "sexuality inverted" outcast. One never knows the real reason any creature lives or dies alone. Instead, we superficially observe and speculate. Pantomiming our relationship to things we'll never understand but somehow come to know and love.
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer from Dallas.
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