On my many travels in my electrical career I was part of a team. The team comprised of two electricians and two apprentices of which I was one.
The electricians were married and were promiscuous which upset me because I knew their wives and had to be silent about their nefarious affairs. This really did hurt me to the core and suppressing it had a price to pay---anger and frustration.
The two sparks and one apprentice used to go to the local dance hall and I sort out Judo, Kendo, Taichi and Meditation groups and various keep fit activities. We all met later in the digs (ours were bed and breakfasts of the cheaper kind and sparks are the name for electricians). They boasted of their sexual encounters. They thought me weird and that did cause a kind of benign rift.
Often when I came out from my activity, most of the time in Northern Britain in fairly run down areas, I would visit the local smokey joe (workingman's cafe) some were open until about 22.00 hrs and I noticed many an elderly cloth hat and black coated gentleman sitting there and had been for hours, sipping and making last his cup of tea.
He (they) seemed to have a vacant stare which seemed to suggest loneliness, depression and boredom. I asked several cafe owners, many gruff and unshaven, smoking roll ups and coughing often, 'do they (he) come in often? 'Some come in all day and just have a pie and many teas'. He went onto say that they are 'unemployed and live in one room(in those days TV's were coming in and expensive) some had an old radio, many were single or widowers and their families poor and gone to search for work elsewhere.
I tried to engage the man in conversation, he told me to fuck off and leave him alone. Talking to a local police officer and part time counseling in his spare time, he told me of the loneliness, some were minors and the mines had closed down, some were ex army and and became alcoholic from the ravages of war, he said loneliness was there main problem, they didn't have the social skills to join a club for veterans and felt bitter that God and the country neglected them. So they sat and stared vacantly over strong tea and watched the world go by, aimlessly by.
I felt a touch of that when I could not find an activity, the digs had no facilities like a lounge, so I used to walk to explore the shoddy unkempt neighborhood, avoiding the pubs and sometimes going into the cafe for the 'cuppa that cheers' I could relate to the man in the cloth hat, no tie and stud shirt, for I was away from home, had nothing in common with my workmates and only meditation saved me from the abyss of loneliness.
I often wondered if they looked within and not to the passing scenario outside which was often dark and raining, cold and damp with very little heating in their room sometimes in a sterile hostel, where the wall paper was peeling off and the dampness made patches on the wall in a tapestry of despair and the worn dirty carpet a mosaic of misery, if the meditation would lift their spirits because they would co join with spirit and they would realize this is a temporary existence and letting go of the despair would and could open a space for something much more wholesome to enter.
I often wondered if they looked within and not to the passing scenario outside which was often dark and raining, cold and damp with very little heating in their room sometimes in a sterile hostel, where the wall paper was peeling off and the dampness made patches on the wall in a tapestry of despair and the worn dirty carpet a mosaic of misery, if the meditation would lift their spirits because they would co join with spirit and they would realize this is a temporary existence and letting go of the despair would and could open a space for something much more wholesome to enter.
SHACK
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