To love is to be lonely. Every love eventually is broken by illness, separation, or death. The exquisite nature of love, the unique quality or dimension in its highest peak, is threatened by change and termination, and by the fact that the loved one does not always feel or know or understand. In the absence of the loved one, in solitude and loneliness, a new self emerges, in solitary thought. The loneliness quickens love and brings to it new perceptions and sensitivities, and new experiences of mutual depth and beauty.
All love leads to suffering. If we did not care for others in a deep and fundamental way, we would not experience grief when they are troubled or disturbed, when they face tragedy or misfortune, when they are ill and dying. Every person is ultimately confronted with the pain of separation or death, with tragic grief which can be healed in silence and isolation. When pain is accepted and felt as one’s own, at the center of being, then suffering grows into compassion for other human beings and all living creatures. Through pain, the heart opens and out of the sorrow come new sensations of levity and joy.
All suffering which is accepted and received with dignity eventuates in deepened sensitivity. One cannot be sensitive without knowing loneliness. To see is to be lonely—to hear, feel, touch—every vital, solitary experience of the senses is a lonely one. Anyone who senses with a wide range of delicate feelings and meanings experiences loneliness. To be open to life in an authentic sense is to be lonely, for in such openness one hears and feels and senses beyond the ordinary. Through loneliness we are refined and sensitized and open to life’s lofty ideals and influences. We are enabled to grow in awareness, in understanding, in aesthetic capabilities, in human relations.
Loneliness has a quality of immediacy and depth, it is a significant experience—one of the few in modern life—in which man communes with himself. And in such communion man comes to grips with his own being. He discovers life, who he is, what he really wants, the meaning of his existence, the true nature of his relations with others. He sees and realizes for the first time truths which have been obscured for a long time. His distortions suddenly become naked and transparent. He perceives himself and others with a clearer, more valid vision and understanding.
In absolutely solitary moments man experiences truth, beauty, nature, reverence, humanity. Loneliness enables one to return to a life with others with renewed hope and vitality, with a fuller dedication, with a deeper desire to come to a healthy resolution of problems and issues involving others, with possibility and hope for a rich, true life with others.
Loneliness keeps open the doors to an expanding life. In utter loneliness, one can find answers to living, one can find new values to live by, one can see a new path or direction. Something totally new is revealed.
In the dark, despairing hours, sometimes only through loneliness can the individual bear to return to confront ugly faces and listen to criticism, and experience hurts inflicted by those one loves most. When one has felt totally forlorn, desolate, and abandoned, one can arrive at a new depth of companionship and a new sense of joy and belonging. When man can leave himself to his own loneliness, he can return to himself with a new commitment to his fellow man. Not an escape from loneliness, or a plan, not strategy and resolution, but direct facing of one’s loneliness with courage, letting be all that is in its fullness, this is a requirement of creative living. To be worthy of one’s loneliness is an ultimate challenge, a challenge which if realized, strengthens the person and puts him more fully in touch with his own resources. At first, the experience of loneliness may be frightening, even terrifying, but as one submits to the pain and suffering and solitude, one actually reaches himself, listens to the inner voice and experiences a strange new confidence. The individual is restored to himself and life again becomes meaningful and worthwhile.
The lonely sufferer helps himself to a fuller realization of self, not by reducing his sense of pain and isolation, but by bringing its full extent and magnitude to consciousness. Great loneliness and suffering are met creatively, as potential growth experiences, only by surrendering to them, fully and completely. Salvation, self-growth, lies in giving full assent to loneliness and suffering, accepting what is, not fighting or resisting, not rationalizing or appealing to external helps, not demanding to know why one has been singled out for so much pain, but submitting one’s self to the experience in total self-surrender. Whoever is able to bear loneliness grows to the stature of his experience. Loneliness paves the way to healing, to true compassion, to intimate bonds with all living creatures and all aspects of nature and the universe.
The “never be lonely” theme is a reflection of man’s estrangement from himself in the world today. When an individual avoids facing directly a situation which contains the seeds of loneliness, he alienates himself from his own capacity for being lonely and from the possibility for fundamental social ties and empathy. It is not loneliness which separates the person from others but the terror of loneliness and the constant effort to escape it. We must learn to care for our own loneliness and suffering and the loneliness and suffering of others, for within pain and isolation and loneliness one can find courage and hope and what is brave and lovely and true in life. Serving loneliness is a way to self-identity and to love, and faith in the wonder of living.
The moments between death and creation, the periods between the end and the beginning, the interval between completion and starting of a significant project are often times of deep loneliness. But in these intervals the individual can come to self-truths, to new strengths, and to new directions. Loneliness is often a painful and restless time. It leaves its traces in man but these are marks of pathos, of weathering, which enhance dignity and maturity and beauty, and which open new possibilities for tenderness and love.
Loneliness is as much a reality of life as night and rain and thunder, and it can be lived creatively, as any other experience. So I say, let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness there is also sensitivity, and where there is sensitivity, there is awareness and recognition and promise.
Being lonely and being related are dimensions of an organic whole, both necessary to the growth of individuality and to the deepening value and enrichment of friendship. Let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness, there also is love, and where there is suffering, there also is joy.