Loneliness

Loneliness has a sneaky character. It can and does become a shadow adversary that follows you around everywhere. As you wade through an ever-growing palette of daily frustrations while your psychology wrestles control and balance, you may arrive at a place where you no longer feel like you're able to manage because of this shadow. The absence of a guiding hand might cause you to wobble which, in the world of a lonely soul, is a sorely missed stabiliser. It's not that you're incapable of consoling yourself; you have the tools to self-manage afterall, it's just that with the pressures of success in a modern world there may seem to be so much less colour than there was in the past or during times when you had far less responsibility. The inevitable shift as we inch closer towards success in whatever form, is that the daily grind switches to require more grit than before which makes the journey feel far less noble. You may find yourself asking why you're even here. It's a good question - "what the hell is the point of any of this?" It's inevitable for survival to become one's running concern at that point, but when that becomes the only goal; turning your inquiry into a self-sabotaging process of mental paralysis, then your questioning may darken which also signals that it's perhaps a bit too late to do something constructive. Your daily routines will all drift towards meaning very little, and experiencing loneliness will amplifiy the severity of your situation. But, there is light. 

Those who are searching for it may become self-critical in their quest for more because it is a destination that quietly creeps away from us as we work to maintain control of the pillars of life that weaken as our balance leaves the building. The strength of those pillars, throughout one's world of loneliness, are proportional to the erosion they endure as a result of our responsibilities. The more we load onto our plate of responsibility, the more our responses to life become less elegant or fine tuned. With every year that passes, it's normal to lose more of our artisanal edge which eventually reaches a point where the concern for one's sanity and well-being will become an unavoidable one to the extent that that our mental moves happen at the speed of a patient recovering from major surgery, literally one step at a time out of an irrational fear that we might fall if we try speed up. 

Many of us don't fear falling exactly; it's often more of a concern that there will be no one to catch us when we do. This means we cannot ever truly fail, or more accurately we cannot allow complete failure or a complete loss of control because if we did it may derail a lifetime of progress from which there may be no return, which sounds quite dire. So, let's frame it another way. Let's say you've run out of air in a room full of poison gas that would almost certainly kill you if you inhaled. What do you do? Do you close your eyes, accept your fate and let go of the hold you have on your lungs, or is there another way? If you do breathe in, one might hope for a quick exit with no conscious awareness of the fact that it's happening, and therein lies the comedy. 

The awareness is the exact tool through which to progress. You may breathe in and that might sign your ticket to the stars, sure, but you'll have done so on your own terms with acceptance being the soft carpet that takes you to your destination. Back in the waking world where its dollars and taxes marred by the need for progress, we experience the same need to breathe in despite knowing that the action may hurt. This is life my friend, and it's the ordained recipe as it was meant, for YOU, and only for you. No one's recipe is quite the same, even though we experience the same kinds of loneliness throughout a lifetime. 

There is no solution to this problem, but then there was never meant to be. The experience you might be having is an entirely human one with "being" at the centre of it all. By being lonely, we learn that there is an unrealised aspect of self that needs to surface and, as with all things in life, it will persist not until you find the solution to loneliness, bur rather till you accept that your path requires it for balance to appear. Once you acknowledge that, you become free of the shackles that loneliness represents, and you almost naturally inch towards it's opposite. It's a game the Universe plays with you, and if you resist, you lose. 

There is nothing wrong with being lonely or feeling lonely. The problem only begins when you label it a problem.