Loneliness

Loneliness is the disease that everyone lives with but not everyone knows they have. I've heard it described as an ache, and though this seems too simplistic, too cliche, I can't help but agree.

I feel it most, not when I am recently rejected or otherwise hurt, but when I am caught unaware, assured in my connection to a world I think loves me. It is when I sit by myself, in happy contemplation of my vital part in the lives of others, that I realize I am not vital and that the world would go on much the same whether I die now or whether I stick around for another sixty years.

The problem, I think, is not in myself, though a trained psychologist might say differently. Rather, I think the problem comes from the very heart of the world, the way things are, the nature of existence itself.

The problem with our existence is that, in a long term and even short term sense, it doesn't matter as much as we think it does. We spend our lives searching for an overarching meaning for us, not the world as a whole, but us. We want to know our stories matter and what we want to see are the details of that significance right down to the very moments in which "life happens." Unfortunately, many of us in this search for our own purpose think it necessary to forget how short our lives are. We also forget how interconnected they are with the larger story, a bigger course and significance.

And this is why we are lonely, why I am lonely. My relationships never give me the significance I desire, I need, in order to exist. As an individual, I don't mean enough to other people to be worth something in the long run, to have lived a story that mattered.

And so it is when I am most secure that I am most lonely, because I realize that no matter how good it gets, connectedness to others in this life can't make me matter or last any longer than if I lived in a cave. Unless I look at my connectedness with others not as something centered on myself, but as centered on something outside myself, outside this world, outside the small sphere I know as "existence."

I would dare to say that everyone, if in a different capacity than me, has felt this same pain. This is the miracle of loneliness, that we've all felt the archetypal ache. The fact that we've all felt it must mean that there's something meant to ease the pain, somewhere, somehow. Otherwise, why would we still describe it as an ache? If everyone has it, why do we not consider it to be a normal thing, if we consider it at all? Instead, we recognize it and it hurts and we go about our own ways of covering or numbing or cutting it out of ourselves. We do something about it. We live.

Might I be so radical as to argue that there is a way, or not a way but a place, to live where the end of the road, if not the journey itself, sees an end to the loneliness. I wrote this to myself, and it ends with an address to myself: does that place exist? Yes. In the truest sense of existence there can be. Good news for me, loneliness: you have a purpose. You are my best friend because you cause me to search for the something missing beyond my solitary self, beyond this solitary world. You cause me to live beyond my own existence.