Rather than take a far-away trip or fill my days with projects and activities during the month of August, I decided to deliberately leave things unstructured this year. As a result, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to learn about loneliness and that adrift, disconnected feeling that can sometimes arise for a person who is spending a lot of time in his or her own company without others. Even when I’m not on vacation, I suspect that I find myself in solitude more often than the average person and this lends itself to presenting opportunities to see this disconnectedness arise. For work, I am alone in the car or in my home office, sometimes for several hours a day. At home, I am often alone for several hours after the end of my school day. Only recently have I begun to really start to see the blessings that arise from allowing myself to be lonely or to feel a sense of disconnection, rather than trying to avoid the feeling or distract myself from it.
A few weeks ago, I decided to experiment with being conscious of these feelings as they came up throughout the day, to bring my focused attention to noticing when I was feeling lonely or disconnected and letting myself lean into it. I would not exactly describe this as fun, but I’m kind of hardcore about my spiritual growth. I discovered that I felt these feelings on many occasions throughout the day, yet it wasn’t as intolerable to manage and deal with as I had thought. In fact, as I acknowledged to myself what I was feeling, as I named it and treated myself with kindness and generosity when I was feeling that way rather than trying to pretend I didn’t feel that way, I slowly started to glimpse a bit of freedom.
I think there are two truths about separateness from and connection with others: one is that I am inextricably connected to others, and what I do has some kind of influence on others, which impacts others, and so on. If you’ve ever had someone show you an unexpected kindness that has altered the course of your day, you know what I’m talking about. The other truth is that we are unquestionably separate from one another since we are in separate bodies. Of course we are going to be lonely and feel disconnected sometimes! How could we not be, with each of us housed in a separate physical body that has a specific biology, with completely different life experiences than those of anyone else?
The part about freedom comes in from knowing and accepting that we are, indeed, separate here in the ‘real world’ or the physical world: I am somehow not like others, or I am separate from them, and this can be lonely. Realizing and accepting this is what ultimately gives me the freedom to express the uniqueness that I may happen to carry. Loneliness and the sense of disconnection that comes with it teaches us about our separateness and how we can honor and act on the stuff within us that is unique and, on the surface, may be separate from the greater whole. It shows us how we can care about ourselves and we can be brave and courageous on our own behalf, and how the benefits of that extend beyond us, helping others to become more of who they deeply are.
When I fully embrace my loneliness and don’t automatically try to fill it up right away with people, activities, or distractions, it creates a space for me to be able to see myself as the person I am. Embracing this willingness to be separate by relaxing with myself and not being like others as a way to try to win their approval allows me to take my rightful place as an individual person on this planet, which paradoxically helps me to fit right in as a part of the greater whole. When I can honor and see my separateness and disconnection, it helps me to see the ways in which I am the same as others and the ways in which I am connected to them. I can then come to know myself more as a whole person, who sometimes happens to be solitary and sometimes happens to be connected with others, while being both solitary and connected with others at the same time.
I am beginning to think that feelings of connection, community, commonality, and solidarity with others just can’t exist without the experience of feelings of separateness, loneliness, and disconnection. How can someone know what it means to be connected and part of a community if they haven’t had the experience of disconnection and separateness? It can be easy to try to cast loneliness aside because it seems, on the face of it, like just another difficult feeling that we don’t really want to have to deal with. Yet like any other feeling, loneliness and disconnection have a lot to teach us about how we are a part of the greater whole. For me, this takes willingness to open to the feelings, cultivate kindness and friendliness toward myself, and allow them to take me deeper into my own experience of self.
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