Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (11 page)

I knew that I had to have a plan. So, I made a list of things I had wanted to do for years but was never in the right situation to try. In any other circumstances, I would never even have had the time to pursue them: study all of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, read all the American musicals, learn to carve leather. But here and now, once my lessons were prepared, I could suddenly be totally immersed in a life that was educational, artistic, even relaxing. It became a time of my life that I have always looked back on with real satisfaction and even a bit of nostalgia.

As a result of that situation, however, I discovered something that has proven invaluable over the years. In order for loneliness—as real as it is—to deplete us, we must feed it.

Loneliness is the perfect setup for self-pity. No one comes to see me; pity me. No one asks how I’m doing; pity me. No one invites me out; pity me. But that’s only the beginning of the problem. Not only do others not see the problem or do anything to address it, but I don’t do anything for me either.

We simply withdraw within ourselves to confirm our misery. Withdrawal itself becomes our only response to an already barren environment. Now there is nothing but emptiness outside and emptiness of our own making inside, as well. There is nowhere to go but further down, both psychologically and spiritually.

But loneliness is another kind of call to go on growing in ways that take us beyond dependency on others to the creation of life’s most important resources within ourselves.

Loneliness is a sign that there are whole parts of us that cry out for development. After all, we are meant to be more than our social lives. We are meant to have inner lives that are themselves rich and satisfying. It is a matter of learning how to become good company for ourselves. We are not meant to lie awake at night wondering if someone, anyone, will come to our rescue. We are meant to be our own best friends.

And at that point, I am the only one who can rescue me. The others can accompany me. They can look out for me. They can offer me their support and understanding and care. But if there is something missing in my life, I’m the only one who really knows what it is. I am the only one who can put it there.

Every life deals with loneliness at some point or other: Our partner dies; sickness sets in that makes the old social calendar impossible; we find ourselves in a new job, a new town, a new country, a new world. More than one person who was once naturally outgoing and apparently self-confident has succumbed to all of those things. The problem is that the more we withdraw, the more withdrawn we become. People stop calling. No one stops by. I never meet anyone new. I never do meaningful new things. But then is not the time to hide from the world; then is the time to strike out in totally new ways to find the rest of the self in the rest of the world.

It is the opportunity we do not seek, to do things we
never thought of doing, and in the end it is an invitation to become new again.

This is the moment the old frame cracks, the old certainties fail, the old patterns and habits and social clubs disappear. The tried-and-true are not only useless now, they are simply gone. The only possibility for emotional survival lies at a time like this in going out into a totally strange place, trusting ourself to new people. Not to burden them but to learn from them. It means that we must do something we have never done before—join a book club or a quilting group or deliver trays for Meals on Wheels—anything that provides structure and regularity until, suddenly, we have a new circle of friends to help us plan our own time differently.

But loneliness is about more than simply figuring out how to use time while we try to forget the pain that comes when we’re at loose ends. It is also a call to make other people’s needs our own. What we learn in loneliness is that everybody needs someone. The question at a time like this, then, is, Who needs something I can do for them? It’s time to get involved with someone else’s emotional support in addition to my own. Which is why, perhaps, so many people who lose a loved one begin groups to support people in similar situations.

Loneliness is not the end of anything. It is the starting point at which we are able, this time, to choose fresh ways of being alive. It’s like being dropped down on the Planet Nowhere and told that you can do anything you’d like to do. And for the first time in your life, you must and you do.

Most of all, loneliness is not a call for other people to
take care of us. Loneliness is the call to ourselves, now that we have acquired a better understanding of it so well, to do something to alleviate the loneliness and needs of others. Dag Hammarskjöld had a keen understanding of an affliction of the soul that easily keeps us awake at night and feeling hollow during the day. “Pray that your loneliness,” he said, “may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”

Love is good for greeting card companies. People everywhere—even people in other parts of the world now—send cards. The cards say: “Miss you,” “Wanting you,” “Grateful for you,” and, of course, “Love you”—especially on Valentine’s Day. The question worth thinking about, of course, is, Who sends them, who gets them, what do they mean by them—and, perhaps even more important, who doesn’t get them or send them and what does that mean, too?

There is, after all, a kind of cachet about being above it all, about not bothering about such things. About not being entangled. Then, it would seem, you can go to bed at night emotionally independent. Free. Unaccountable to anyone else’s agenda. Unaccountable to anyone else’s needs. Carefree and careless. “I’m my own person,” they
put it, as if that were some kind of personal achievement, one of the great triumphs of existence, to have no sense of accountability or responsibility or enduring affection for anyone but the self.

The irritating question, the question that rankles the soul, however, the question that can really make a person uneasy in the still of a friendless night, is the obvious one: Now that you are free, what has your freedom gotten you?

In the answer to that question lies a wisdom that little else in life can garner. It takes a long look into a mirror to even approach the depths of it.

On the surface, loners are a rare breed. Almost everyone looks as if they are attached to someone somehow. As best friend or confidant. As lover, partner, or spouse. But as Eric Hoffer puts it, “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.” These so-called connections are often only a superficial patina on the social dimensions of life. They mask as the real thing. But real relationships require commitment and concern, affection and truth, independence as well as support. Loners are the friends who come to all the parties but who are never around when they’re needed.

To be a loner with a mask is a precarious situation. There are learnings to be had here, all of them the hard way.

Loners soon discover, when they find themselves confronted with the big things of life—debilitating sickness, great loss, death, a plundered heart, a deep disappointment—how much there is that cannot be done alone in life. There are some things only friends can do for us: understand our grief, sustain our despair, pick up our load, be a light in our darkness. Without that kind of intimacy and confidentiality,
we are left alone to smolder in the pain of it all. We become more prone to try to anesthetize what we cannot resolve. In that event, we are left with two problems where only one had been before.

The illusion of self-sufficiency is a very serious emotional barrier to being able to negotiate the real tasks of life. It denies us the gift of criticism: There is no one to tell us what we need to know, and no one we are willing to listen to. We isolate ourselves from the very things we need to plot the success we seek.

All the intellect, all the skill in the world, cannot substitute for the fine art of human relationships which, in the end, are what we need most to steer us through life, steady our steps, and carry us over the boulders that block it. Self-love is a sterile relationship at best. How do we learn to love others without the model of those who love us? Where do we turn to understand life when we have exhausted our own resources, but have failed to attach ourselves to the resources of others to complement our own? To make ourselves our own god is to worship a puny god indeed.

From those seeds—a growing awareness of personal incompleteness, insufficiency of soul, the limitations of self-love and the deficiency of our own personal resources—evolve the ability to love beyond narcissism. It leaves us standing stripped of our pretenses and vulnerable to the rest of the world. Love stretches us beyond ourselves and stretches the soul toward inclusiveness. It makes us equal parts of the human race with all the strength and all the weakness, all the good and all the frailty that brings.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships
we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

Friends enable us to know and to accept our own deep needs and so understand and support the needs of others. They bring us home to ourselves and to the rest of the world at the same time. To be in relationship with someone is to open ourselves to becoming more than we can possibly be alone. Then, when that happens, the long nights of wondering, as one more night slips by, what it is that can possibly be missing in life while we touch the empty spot in the heart are over now.

Then when the birthdays come and the anniversaries pile up and Valentine’s Day comes again, we not only send cards, we will also get them.

The ads are everywhere. The Internet pours them out in multiple millions: fifteen ways to get him to date you, twelve ways to tell if she is the one for you, ten ways to get your love to marry you, eight ways to get your partner’s attention. There’s no end to the lists or the numbers. The only thing wrong with any of them is that they are all selling a bogus product. There are no ways at all to make anyone notice you, love you, choose you, understand you or stay with you, short of physical captivity, of course—and that’s illegal.

The truth is that love is a very individual thing, a very personal reaction, a very unique relationship. All the tricks in the social repertoire without the chemistry that makes the relationship unique will not work. And that’s not foolproof either. Natural attraction brings people together, yes, but it does not promise to keep people together.

Even when people stay together forever, there is little proof that they completely understand each other or can really hear the other person’s pain, or want the same things or perceive the world in the same way and from the same perspective.

Nor can love ever assure two people that they are totally in sync. On the contrary: If anything is difficult, it seems, it is couples’ communication of any kind—in professional comradeships, in long-standing friendships, in married couples. Psychologists and counselor types devote entire workshops to it. They develop therapy sessions to guide couples through it, or at least cure them of their false hopes. They fix what the ads imply should really be natural to us all.

But, if forming couples is natural, if coming to love another person is important, staying in love—in communion, in community—is hard work. No one is an island, the poet John Donne told us. And that’s true. But no one is a copy of anybody else either.

The ads that promise eternal bliss, perfect coupledom and a sense of total communion with another human being—with any other human being—have a truth-in-advertising problem. Not only are such relationships rare, they are for the large part impossible. And that’s good. Otherwise we wouldn’t have couples at all. We would just have bad copies of the one who is the real person, the dominant person, in this relationship. Then, one person’s tastes, goals, agendas take precedence, eclipse often, the plans, hopes and likes of the other. The “couple” becomes one person in charge and the other in a supporting role.

But love is not like that.

Real love is a very lonely venture. We always want more from the other person than we can ever hope to get. And we always give less than is needed or expected, even when we think we’re giving everything we have.

Love is not simply coming to be attracted to another human being. In the great eternal cosmology of life, love functions to take us more deeply into ourselves than it can possibly take us into the unknown Other. Love teaches us how really needy we are. Or perhaps, even more impacting, how actually uninterested we are in anyone besides ourselves.

We come to experience the long hard journey from the self to the other. If we’re lucky, we come to realize that the purpose of love is to take us out of our own cravings for attention to attend to someone else. And there’s the rub. Love is always a matter of getting beyond our perpetual self-talk long enough to read the signs of someone else’s need for approval, for care, for attention, for development. It is the measure of our own unselfishness, not simply an assessment of the selflessness of the other.

Loneliness, therefore, is built right into the love relationship. It begins in the loneliness that motivated the search in us for someone to match our lives, in the first place. Then, it comes out of a need to find the one other person in the world who would care enough about the things we care about to accompany us through them.

Love functions in the loneliness that comes from expecting what no one other person can possibly give us—total satisfaction, total presence, total joy and total
understanding. The more love we find then, the more loneliness that comes with it. Wanting total absorption of another person defeats the very gifts that real love alone can give—independence, confidence and the courage to be ourselves.