Closeness: On the loneliness of aloneness

As I open my laptop this statement greets me:

For a long while I've noted that my attention is drawn to the idea of befriending the unlovely in myself and others.  I've written elsewhere of the deep impact that O'Donohue has had on my thinking.  I'll mention another, Pádraig Ó Tuama.

What plays at the edges of my mind this morning is that "deepest tranquility"  (no tranquillities is not misspelled either), "fear," and the "yielding" part.  Let's explore.  Let's try to let ourselves think about loneliness of aloneness in the context of closeness, the warmth of hearth and the coziness of self-shelter.

The loneliness of aloneness may be one of the superstructures upon which human dignity is supported.  The paradox is that I have a strong repulsion to the feeling of loneliness, until the moment I crave solitude, and then the pendulum swings the other way.  Befriending loneliness, my own, seems like an oxymoron.

Maybe some space and time is needed to let this big statement rattle around a bit.  It's unpleasant. We are such social creatures: we who "know" ourselves to be Homo Sapiens.  Homo-dignitas and all that we may uncover behind the meaning we make out of "dignitas"...well a short blog-post, would not do it justice, ever.  I'm curious to explore my thinking on this.  I wonder if you are too?

If I know the warmth of relationship with others maybe eventually I can know warmth of relationship with myself.  Perhaps when I think of warmth/love/friendship "loneliness" does not seem to even have a space in the room.  Loneliness seems like a place of exile and repulsion.  Sometimes it just feels freezing to think of being lonely.  I'm not sure how comfortable or cozy I am with my own loneliness. It's longing for friendship, mine specifically.  Befriending this part of myself seems like a desirable thing.  Somehow becoming friendly seems like a thing that would sooth this isolated, lonely part.

When I thinking of lovingly embracing in myself that which so frightens me, which seems so unbearable....You know that feeling when you've held your child close, or a pet, or your partner, and your world was safe and you knew that love was flowing that is the warmth of love that I believe I have some internal power to give to myself.  I/me/we "mwe" possess inside of ourselves, and is part of the "yielding", that releasing of what already exists, a space of love and rest, and wholeness, and there is no destination, there is no arriving at, it's already in the present moment.  I am there.  There was no journey, and there was a long journey to these flashes of internal perception.

There is a line from 1883 that goes:  "The fear of death is the actually the fear of being forgotten."  This is perhaps the truth of man's deepest fear.  Maybe my loneliness does not want to be forgotten.  This topic is one of many unknown fears and perhaps not enough personal knowledge yet, but one can know that there is deep water beneath as he dives under the surface. Maybe the raging storm has driven us below the surface to find some kind of calm.  This is a mash up of analogies for sure.

Back to loving un-loved aspects of ourselves.  Somehow there is an appeal of rest in the vision of befriending my own loneliness.  To become close with this.  To get comfortable in the presence of it's discomfort, in the presence of my own discomfort with my own discomfort....now I've gone off the deep end.  

The LOOK.  Yep a bit of philosophical humor! "Ponty & Sartre" this is rich!

Self, peering in on the self, peering in on awareness.  Awareness of awareness...maybe there is something to multiple realities existing at once.  Here is where I think the crux of the self's loneliness culminates.  It wants it's own approval, but part of that approval is bound up in the look(s) embedded across the development of our human conscious experiences.

The way we look at ourselves is cultivated over great spans of time.  I'm only now able to "see" myself in new ways.  I'm only 45 but even in my own experiences of self-perceptions, I've shielded my gaze, created bad-faith actions against myself because in my gaze I saw stuff.   Stuff that my culture had not framed a definition or cubbyhole to place or to hold that space.  There are the looks of powerful lookers, parents, priests, peers...other's looking on, and how they looked at these issues revealed a gaze of condemnation.  I was terrified of seeing what I perceived, and most of this happened almost imperceptibly, until gradually I started to trust my own ability to see what my eyes were seeing.

Some know the depths of development traumas, some worse than mine, others know less, and no one knows my experience.  No one...except maybe the most afraid person: me.  There are the thoughtless looks.  The clowns danced, the bands distracted, and I still knew what I'd seen.  I could not keep from looking again and again, until finally I was able to formulate:  "I'm gay".  (My acculturated coping mechanisms were all built out of fear and horror!  I thought I was looking at a horror show inside of myself.  Everyone around me would gasp and shy away from "looking" at gay people, so I did the same:  the horror was without, in the fact that gay was not seen.  In their looking they would look past, over, beyond, and not see, not see me).  Unseen.

Loneliness in this context (unseen) must be a special kind of loneliness.  The self-negation, the isolation, the exile.  And then the warm embrace of my kind and loving self to begin to listen and love, and ask to know what in fear I'd driven from myself.  To look but to look differently.  

Compassionate looking: I have been seen and have gifted really seeing for example my son, my ex-wife, a few times I've "seen" both a stranger and a close friend, and at some point I am realizing the grandest experiment: seeing me.  I am not proposing this as a state of enlightenment.  This is a parallel space where human time is perhaps un-helpful.  

What is the foundation of Sartre's Beingness?  It's Nothingness, and is a complex idea, for sure, but one that I cannot get out of my head.  Somehow, loneliness is related to the arising of healthy self-love.  I'm somewhat convinced of this notion, at least at the present moment.  There is a closeness of being in the warm embrace of caring for the fearful lonely part of ourselves.  I think that we can be thankful for the love of others.  Some of us are lucky to find a wholeness that other's only hope for, so for me, charting my course through my own loneliness seems to hold some meaning.  If for no better reason, than it means something to me.  In this I find dignity.  

I think, that I can gift more moments of seeing you and others if I can see me.  Together perhaps we will ignite a courage to relentlessly befriend that which so desperately wants to be free, but which is stuck and does not know how not to be any other way, but lost and lonely.   Notice, that this format is quite different than other models of looking to others to heal us.  Jesus failed me in this sense, and possibly Jesus saved me in another sense.

The burden of loneliness is not some badge of honor, we should not pursue it merely to redeem ourselves from our selves.  Loneliness is a terrible consequence of consciousness.  The beauty of this knowledge re-framed, may make us into something approaching Homo-Dignitas.

Namaste.  I worship the loneliness in you, and I hope you can identify in some way with what you have read here.  Maybe, just maybe we shall be somewhat less alone.  Perhaps when we understand ourselves we may approximate something closer to human fellowship.  A model that honors what we all cannot avoid and perhaps what we should all embrace: seeing ourselves, and really "seeing" others.  

We should probably go easy on "the look" too....just saying.