Loneliness is sneaky, it catches up with you without your awareness. It’s in the little things you do, and the little things you say. Sometimes, it can go unnoticed for a whole life time. People react to this sneaky little feeling differently. For me, I notice it at first as a feeling being down, a little empty inside and I don’t know why. I think perhaps something is wrong, so I try to fix it by going for a walk, stepping outside to talk with people, contacting a friend. But none of that ever works. I start to do more to cover it up, without even realising that I am.
Slowly the emptiness starts to feel uncomfortable, so I try to fill it by eating more, drinking more, exercising more… Tiring myself out until I only seek to sleep more. All this time, loneliness is sitting there by my side. Staring at me in the face, looking at me in the eyes, as I avoid him and pretend that he’s not there. Being lonely can be shameful at times, difficult to admit to, as if you are not good enough for your friends or heaven forbid your friends are not good enough for you. It’s a dense, heavy thing, that twists the space in which it resides… changing your perception. Making things which are normal seem hostile in some unexplained way.
Sometimes, I am able to feel his gaze. After all, I’ve known him for so long. I start to notice him in the little things I say, in the people I reach out to and in the evasive behaviours I engage in. Ah, I’m feeling lonely again. The realisation releases the pressure. I know where to go. Where I always go these days.
Straight to Rainer Maria Rilke. And it just so happens that this morning is grey, damp and cold… a perfect morning to talk about being alone. He always saw solitude as a vast mystery from which new things emerge, a wildly different definition from the one which I somehow adopted in life: that loneliness is because you are not worth spending time with. He talks about loneliness in much of his work, but especially in the book Letters to a Young Poet:
And you must not allow yourself to become confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something within you that seeks to emerge. It is precisely this urge that, used calmly and deliberately as a tool of your art, will aid in you spreading your solitude over a vaster space.
It’s something that works on you and in you. The quicker you realise it’s there, the better. It is not something to be ashamed of, but rather a reality of moving through life. A reality of change, inner or outer, and you only realise that it’s nothing to be afraid of after you meet its gaze. It’s not something that can be pushed or prodded, it doesn’t respond well to pressure. It can only be embraced, loved and appreciated. Moved through, resided in, without fear of falling.
That’s all it is really, a transitional space. Just like moving down a hallway from one room to another. A transition that I have always elongated by thinking that it’s wrong in some way, or that it’s embarrassing, and needs to be fixed. I had always ended up spending days or weeks instead of hours hanging out in the space in between, because I was always focused on why I felt that way. As if it were a problem with a root that needed to be dug up and heaved out of the ground. Now I know better.
Thank goodness for grey mornings like this, when I am forced to sit alone in a room with only loneliness to keep me company.
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