'Avoiding relationship?' 'I hope so!' There is a peculiar frisson that occurs when you meet someone's eyes and there is openness on both sides. There is not the world and two I-nesses, there is just the world and I-ness. You'd like to think the other is very far away, on the other side of the world, but they are embarrassingly close, right here in fact. But relationships are something else, people are not so interesting, entanglements are born of desire, they are 'foreign dust', and it ill becomes you to be so eager to wallow in the notion that there is something you need from them, something that only others can supply, that you'll pay for with your solitude so eagerly foregone. To engage is to take a ticket for a circular journey, but not to engage, to affirm your self-sufficiency is to take a trip for a different sort of ride through a familiar set of stations. Since you are never immune from desires and demands, the state of self-sufficiency becomes defensive, becomes a shield. You end by feeling so safe that the impulse to expose yourself to temptation becomes irresistible. Oddly, in spite of the disinterested spirit with which you undertook the experiment, the temptation proves unexpectedly effective. So next you think you can harness the energy it releases and divert it to serve your ego-drives, that is, your inquiry into the nature of the more authentic self now come into salience. This stage doesn't last long, but leads to loneliness and frustration. Detachment from desire simultaneous with experiencing desire seemed to open a clear path to gratification, but in the event it made no difference. You are forced to ask yourself why you can't satisfy your desires. And why not easily, since you can see they don't matter? What else is it that you lack? What social capital? What had been taken as a positive choice for isolation is now seen to be a forced choice. This realisation leads to paranoia. You have performed so charmingly in order to receive grace but have not received it. You look at yourself from the point of view of this judgment and there are no limits to your self-contempt, your guilt. And so then you must turn back to others to beg some absolution, and the cycle resumes.