In my life I have met very few people who are not lonely.

Loneliness is pervasive. Most of us, if we are honest, feel lonely.

We can think of loneliness as the experience of feeling alone, isolated, disconnected from the world around us. 

Often, we cover up loneliness by socialising, by spending time with others, drinking with others, having a fun time. 

But usually that doesn’t mean that those others see us in our deep griefs, in our fear of how precarious our existence is, in the tears that gently flow as the silent night clouds pass in the sky and we sit awake.

We go to sleep, we wake up and the next day, there is another gathering, another dinner, another person to meet over coffee, but the soft core of our heart, where our emotions melt, where we give in to something uncertain, difficult, vulnerable, remains inaccessible to most of these relationships. 

Conversations start with, “How are you?” and “I’m good, thank you”, but very often, neither does the questioner truly want to know how the other person is, nor does the other person truly want to tell. 

Having a family, being in a marriage or a partnership is no indicator of not being lonely. 

A friend facilitates a ‘loneliness listening circle’ once a fortnight. It is a circle I sometimes attend. A few people, usually three or four, who share what makes them feel lonely. For me, that circle has helped me give words to the thought that for some reason, loneliness has come to be labelled as bad, but is it, really?

Loneliness is merely the awareness of our distance from others. Our disconnection from others.

As you sit reading this, think of the people in your life, and feel into what the space between you and them is like. Is there a sense of disconnection?

Disconnection often comes with grief, and with anxiety about how much grief we hold. Sometimes we have spent our entire childhoods feeling lonely, not even knowing that that is the word for the feeling we have.

Meeting this pain, not being afraid of grieving, allows us to let go of the struggle against loneliness. 

Can we accept this loneliness, without fighting it? 

Can we see it as perhaps our longest standing companion, who was with us when we were born and who shall be with us as we die. We are truly alone in this cosmos.

A stream of sorrow flows when the door to loneliness is opened. Perhaps this is the reason we resist. This sorrow is enormous. 

We are used to denying it, to holding on to our conventional ways, to people, to ideas, to habits, to endlessly scrolling, to images of how things should be. 

We sit at the brink of this sorrow, avoiding dipping into it, yet never fully managing to be away from it. As a lingering reality, it seems to be always around the corner. Often our social interactions are devised to cover up the silences, to incessantly talk, to not let the sorrow that runs underneath show up. 

But this sorrow is our friend. 

This sorrow is not our enemy to be walled away. 

This sorrow brings peace, to the extent it is not fought against. To the extent it is truly lived.

In the peace of this sorrow, we find a self that is not narrow, that is not striving to not feel what is there. It is a self whose boundaries are porous, whose boundaries are meltable. It is a self willing to be vulnerable, fragile, to admit its failures and fears to someone who would listen. 

It is a self that knows the stillness of the night if it pays attention to it. That can follow that stillness to very far into the universe. 

When not striving to deny our isolation from others, we find a deep connection with the universe. 

With the source of all things, from where the squirrels come, to where the deep night sky leads in its silences.

Loneliness then is a place from which to dip into an expansive experience of the self. To become tender, to melt, to allow oneself to be touched by others. Others in our immediate environment, but also by vaster realities of space in which we live. 

Only when we have accepted our loneliness can we truly see another person as he is. Only then we can actually have a relationship with the full human being in front of us, rather than only the part of them that we need to not feel lonely. 

We see the person as an expression of the universe, not as an object to distract ourselves with, from the universe in us.

In truly meeting out loneliness, we truly meet other beings.

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