Aloneness in the New Year

Here you may now be, a few more days into the New Year, the festivities of Christmas behind you, getting back into your job if you have one, perhaps caught up again in the rush of busyness? Some may be wondering what happened to the break – where did it go? Others may feel the sense of let-down, back facing whatever isn’t working in their lives, maybe even feeling alone once again after the sense of connection that the feast period can bring.

This is when any commitment you make to have your life be different gets tested. This is when it’s important to have any intentions you set for the New Year forefront, to think about and refine and yet keep as a point of commitment. Any intention will surely be tested – that’s part of the process.

For a long time, I used to feel an anti-climax after Christmas. All that expectation and then what? Christmas after a while became false in my mind, as something that had really long lost its real meaning as a celebration of a birth. It seemed like a materialistic orgy, fanned by the advertising industry and our desire for more. Also, it was after Christmas that I would feel most alone. I remember once reading an Ernest Hemingway novel and then howling buckets at the seeming hopelessness of ever finding someone to share my life, that at one level I would always be alone. Then I found a nice philosophical basis for how I felt in Existentialism. Then I filled the gap by becoming a busy professional and busyness filled my life, until that is I got divorced and lost my mother to breast cancer and started to explore what my aloneness was really about.

I don’t know how much you resonated with the story described in the last posting. It has clearly impacted huge numbers of people. It’s been carried on almost all the major national newspapers and on a number of TV channels. And we’ve had a vast number of calls. Relatives have now come forward and so family will be at the woman’s funeral, along with a lot of well-wishers. However I was particularly struck by the people who said they could not bear to think of that woman having no visitors in the 5 years she was in a nursing home and have nobody come to her funeral. In the Sunday Times a columnist started her article with a conversation with two single friends about just this situation.

I finished my last posting by stating the point that unless we deal with our own experience of aloneness, in whatever way that shows up for each of us, we’ll very likely get that experience at the end of our lives. One thing we all share is our mortality. It is an existential reality.

I think one way this experience shows up is around relationship. We many of us search for another in our lives in order to fill the gap inside us, the fear of being alone, of not being loved, of feeling unlovable, of not being good enough or worthy enough, or what other way that is felt or thought about. Then we lose our partner and we are alone. I think a huge number who called us were alone and had lost someone.

My own take on this dilemma of existence is that we are never alone, we are at one. Our journey and our challenge is to re-discover who we really are all along. Also, for me, this is no mere rationalisation or belief but a felt experience. Our essence is pure joy, love, enthusiasm, aliveness, laughter, energy. To know this is to experience this in ourselves and to see it in others, whoever they are and whatever our connection with them. A lot of our personal development training is about this.

Your understanding might be different. But for both you and me, we have the same challenge, to transcend the human experience of aloneness, in whatever way that shows up.



If you want to be sent future postings to your e-mail in-box, put your e-mail address in the box in the right-hand column here, under the heading “Ways to subscribe”.

Why not e-mail this posting to a friend? Just copy this URL in the top line of your browser and paste it into your e-mail content.