On Loneliness

A couple of weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night. I'm not sure why, but I thought I heard something or sensed something. Whatever the case, I was awake. Awake and completely frightened. I walked into the living room to see that there was nothing there at all but the furniture. Still, I was still completely afraid.

And, I was afraid because, at that moment, I realized I was totally alone.

Now, I'm someone who doesn't usually have problems with being alone. I'm an only child, and I think we do a pretty good job of coping with a few hours (or days or weeks or years) spent alone. As something of an expert on this state of being, allow me to enlighten you on a couple of ways that being alone is not such a bad thing.

Sometimes being alone is comforting because you need a little time to yourself. After spending hours in a crowd or with a group, it can be nice to take some time to move to your own beat. And, sometimes it's nice to do just that. I've taken plenty of vacations by myself, and, let me tell you, it's nice to see the sites you want to see when you want to see them without having other people complaining about how much their feet hurt or telling you how hungry, thirsty, sleepy, whatever they are. Imagine vacationing your way!

But...sometimes being alone is just, well, lonely. When I've gone on vacation alone, there have been times when I couldn't wait to call someone, just to be able to talk for a while. Even while spending time in places many people would love to be like Paris, London, or Berlin, there's something that's made me need to have someone else to talk to. And, sometimes--like the other night--being alone can be the scariest feeling in the world.

It seems like being alone is most frightening when there is the sense of impending danger. But, there's another time when being alone feels frightening, and that's when it feels like the state of being alone is one that has no end. We need other people around us, and, in their absence, we need a sense that we are never truly alone.

I was reading Donald Miller's book, Searching for God Knows What the other day, and he addresses this really well. What he does a good job of is talking about the many ways we try to fill the void of loneliness. In his case, he tried to fill it with being smart, with having people affirm his intelligence. I couldn't relate to that at all. Well, maybe a bit. It is affirming to see good grades and to get good comments on papers. It is affirming to see yourself making progress on a paper. I love to write my papers single-spaced and then put them in double-spaced type, just to see how they grow and grow. But, no matter how many pages I type or how many times I write good papers, I know that those things do nothing to fill the hole of loneliness. It isn't a term-paper-sized hole. It isn't even (in my consumerism-driven times) a new-dress-and-shoes-sized hole, though sometimes that can be more filling than anything.

Unfortunately, the hole is much bigger than that. Donald Miller writes of the time after he renounced his faith in God,

"I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone. And it wasn't just me. I could see it in the people in the movies. I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside of himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley Maclaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did. Later, when I set this truth about myself, and for that matter about the human race, next to what the Bible was saying about who God is, what happened at the Fall, and the sort of message Jesus communicated about humanity, I realized Christian spirituality fit my soul like a key. It was quite beautiful, to be honest with you. This God, and this spirituality was very different from the self-help version of Christianity. The God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear" (43-44).

I'm sorry that quote is so long, but I really loved all of it. I think we look for so many things to fill that loneliness, but it seems that nothing is quite enough. More importantly, the things we search for are all things that we may not always have. Miller's idea shows us that only this relationship with God is something that is not dependent on other people; Miller's sense of worth comes from a relationship with God, something that can never be taken away.

I really like this way of thinking. And, quite honestly, thinking this way makes it a little easier to sleep through the night, even when I wake to strange noises.