Loneliness

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. People are lonely in marriages and in crowds and at their own birthday parties, and people are alone for years without being lonely at all. The difference is not the number of bodies in the room.

Abandonment

What loneliness feels like, underneath, is abandonment. Not just that nobody is here, but that nobody is coming. That the world has closed over the place where you were and gone on without noticing.

That feeling is real. But abandonment is a story about the future and the past, told at high volume in the present. Nobody came yesterday; nobody will come tomorrow. The thoughts are unusually persuasive because there is no one in the room to contradict them. Look at where they are happening.

Never less alone

The old masters made a strange claim about the moment of death, the one passage every person makes without company. They said that at that moment we are less alone than we have ever been, because what comes to meet us is not a stranger but our own nature, the awareness that has been with us since before our first breath, like a mother receiving a child.

This is easier to see when the room is empty. Right now, something is aware of the loneliness, of the silence, of the thought that no one is coming, of the ache in the chest. That awareness is not lonely, because it is not a person waiting for another person. It was there in the crowd and it is here in the empty room, exactly as present in one as in the other. This does not replace people. It means the story “there is no one here” is not quite accurate, and noticing that changes the texture of the hour.

Solitude

When a person finds this, even a little, being alone changes its character. It stops being a wound and becomes a room. In solitude the furniture of conversation and obligation is gone, and what is left is the plain fact of being awake.

I spent three days alone once in a cave near Kathmandu while my mother, who had just broken her arm, was cared for by my father and others. I have never been more physically alone or more worried for someone I loved. It did not feel like abandonment. It felt like sitting inside my teacher’s heart, with all the tenderness and vulnerability of my mother’s health present in it. The difference between alone and lonely is not in the cave.

Reach out anyway

None of this means you should stay alone. Human beings need each other, and awareness does not make friends unnecessary. If loneliness has gone on a long time, treat it as the serious condition it is. Call someone. Go where people are, even if it feels absurd. Ask a doctor about it if it has become heavy and dark; loneliness and depression keep each other company, and both can be treated.

What changes is the starting point. Reaching out from abandonment sounds like begging, and people can hear it, and it makes reaching harder. Reaching out from a place that is already, in its ground, not alone sounds like an invitation.

For tonight, breathe out, rest in the pause at the end of the breath, and notice what is aware of the silence. Tomorrow, call someone.