No one wants to be alone.
Life is just better when you travel with others.

These are phrases often heard during dinner parties, touted by self help gurus and generally understood within our culture. In response, we pair up or find a group we have things in common with or get on facebook and reconnect with people we used to have things in common with. All in the name of sharing our lives with others, not being alone. Like so much else in this world it often doesn’t matter who we surround ourselves with, as long as we’re surrounded. In a desperate effort not be alone people endure abuse (physical and mental), betrayal, neglect and just plain indifference. As long as you have people at the party, it doesn’t matter, right? We need friends and family otherwise no one will come to our funeral.

Maybe it’s a fear of being alone, you know dying in your apartment someday and no one knows until there’s a weird smell. Nightmare, right? In an effort to avoid being alone people do some crazy things, it’s threaded through our culture. If you see a person sitting at a restaurant alone or in the movies alone, something must be wrong. Hence the reason people really believe they have 400 friends on Facebook. Quantity over Quality…the American Mantra.

A few years ago I made a conscious effort to rid my life of anyone that did not bring joy or happiness to me. Not to say the people still in my life are always sunny and they go through tough times and life can still get pretty ugly, but they are genuine and there for me, as I am for them.

In other words, I still wanted to have the party, but if you brought nothing to the party I no longer wanted you in my life. Sounds cold, but it has made all the difference. You see, if you move away from people that just suck off you, eventually they move on to suck off someone else and you’re free. They were never really friends or family, so why hang on to them. It wasn’t genuine, so I let it go.

If I had a party now there would be a lot fewer people, but I’d want every one of them there. They fill me up and I like to think I do the same for them.

We have a “sock basket” in our house. All of the socks for our entire family come out of the dryer and go into this basket. Sometimes it’s sorted and all socks are put away, but most of the time the socks stay in the basket and when someone needs a pair they reach into the sock basket and pair them up. By the end of the week the basket is pretty empty and the only things left are the single socks. You can’t just pair them up because they don’t match or they are different sizes. They don’t compliment each other, so they stay separate.

Eventually a new load of socks are dumped into the basket and I imagine the single socks have a new chance to find a pair, but if not they still rest easy in the sock basket rather than being paired somewhere they don’t belong. My thoughts from the laundry room.

Don’t Sleep with your Socks On!

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