Existential
Aloneness
“…as
soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to
open to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections
with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape
affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work;
it takes years to bring your mind home.”
John
O’Donohue (Eternal Echoes)
This
quote from John O’Donohue is about our existential aloneness. It feels almost
prescient. John died in 2008, long before the pandemic forced us to confront
our aloneness. Some of us, myself being one, have lived alone for many years by
choice, and yet, being alone not by choice has been a challenge. So many insights
have come from it. I have discovered and experienced just how short my fuse is—my
irritability lies in a very shallow grave, easily excavated. The other is John’s
idea of “scraping affirmation from others.” I see just how often I do that as
opposed to creating something simply for my own pleasure—there is a stark
difference.
O’Donohue
wrote that each time we go out into the world, we lose a part of ourselves. Most of
the time, I believe we willingly sacrifice those parts, but at times, our own personhood
becomes the scapegoat. If we spend all our days outwardly focused, then when we
are forced to be alone, as we have been for the past year, we have no ground to
stand on. As we like to say in politics nowadays, “there’s no there there.” We
feel adrift and lonely as opposed to simply being by ourselves.
The world holds many
disrupters of serenity. Traffic, loud people, hateful looks, road rage,
rudeness, are a few serenity killers for me. And that’s my fault. If I am
willing to give up my serenity that easily, then I probably didn’t have it to
begin with.
We can
run from solitude if we choose—plenty of people do. But it will not cancel the
call of our souls to come home to “rest in the house of our own heart.” Running
to the world is like putting a band-aid on a cut. It delays, distracts, makes us
feel better for a minute, but it does not heal. That is an inside job. Learning
to accept one’s essential aloneness is a lifetime’s work. But when we do that
work, we have something real to bring out to the world—our whole and authentic
self. And that is plenty.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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