In the liminal state between waking and sleep, you muster all the strength you have and extend your arm towards your beloved next to you and, they’re not there. You hop nimbly off the bus and quicken your step with anticipation of seeing your grammy who lives in the modest apartment downstairs - did she make rice pudding?
For a moment, you've forgotten that they left — your partner, your grandmother, your beloved friend, or your dog. It doesn’t matter how they left — they’re gone, and suddenly you feel alone. The feeling matches reality. You are alone.
You are missing them and, that state of being can pass as you process the feeling, the sadness. Maybe that state even lingers a while. It’s a part of life. It passes. For all one knows, it doesn’t. Maybe it continues to linger. Then you aren’t indeed alone, you feel lonely. You are naturally wanting something that isn’t anymore - the companionship, the laughter, the tears and all the things that invariably come with connection and relationship. You miss that person; you miss the feeling that you felt when you were with them.
When we look to others to give us the things we need most, we can ask ourselves if we’re giving these things to ourselves.
We can dearly miss things and people we never even had. They are emblems of instinctive desire creating a wanting, a lack. Others can seem to have it all — the people and things around them and still be lonely. You might even be that person with a partner or other people around you and be lonely at times. Sometimes that state passes, and sometimes it seems perpetual.
We can dearly miss things and people we never even had.
The ineffable sadness will come and go. That by heart is life on Earth. It is when that sad state becomes perpetual, then it can become a negative state — it turns into loneliness. Eventually and inevitably, as time passes, the weight of sadness becomes easier to carry from loss, separation and change.
Though all the while, when you are lonely, there is someone else that we must confront — the person we have to come face to face with each day, and that is you. The whole you - the integral you. Do you like yourself?
Sadness, discomfort and scapegoats
Whatever independent judgements we place on our attitudes, habits and unique ways of being are our own. When we are alone, there is no one else to blame for how we behave. That is equally true when we have others around us all the time too. For then, it’s easier to find a convenient scapegoat, someone else to blame.
If you haven’t been alone very much throughout your life, it can be profoundly uncomfortable at first. The discomfort isn’t the state of loneliness when we miss someone or miss the way things were at one time. The discomfort is finding out who you really are without the social and cultural expectations of others. When surrounded by others and their apparent wants, needs and, expectations from and of you — we must take time to be alone. Not only to know and appreciate ourselves but to restore our own sense of well being.
When we don't know ourselves, it's not others who have abandoned us, it's us. We have abandoned the person who we will spend our entire life with on Earth.
When we don't know ourselves, it's not others who have abandoned us, it's us.
As we let go of others ideas of whom we are, and we come to know ourselves, this discomfort can transform into joyful ease as we peel the layers away of identities placed upon us, even the ones that we/ve built ourselves. Then we are alone and enjoying that aloneness.
Through the years, we keep shedding our skin. It keeps growing back as our life transforms and changes until we get comfortable in our skin. In each new version of ourselves, we will continue to be challenged and continue to grow and evolve with each life that we live in this lifetime.
All of these thoughts and ideas, even if they are valid are separated from daily life when we're in the world living. We might think we don’t have the luxury of being alone. Or maybe we don’t want to be alone because we are trying to distract ourselves from ourselves. Get to know yourself. Take some time and take up some space. You are worth knowing.
