Thank You for the Language of Alone and the Meaningful Crowd
There are very few people, no matter how much they love you, who are going to crawl into your coffin with you when you die.
And, unless you are a twin, nobody helped you find your way through the birth canal either.
There are just some things we’ve got to do alone.
There are also some things we can only discover alone.
I exchanged e-mails with a new pal recently in which he stated;
“The universe has emphatically insisted that I learn to enjoy life and find peace, meaning, and happiness, alone, as I am.”
This pal is having difficulty adjusting to aloneness after being in a twenty year relationship into which he naturally wove his sense of identity and meaning.
The transition through lonely, to lonesome, into alone is a very arduous journey for one’s psyche.
It is a path of revelation and discovery that can barely be put into words—it’s emotional and irrational and has a language of it’s own.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time alone, whether by a self induced circumstance, or merely by factors beyond their control, has whispered or screamed in this language of aloneness to themselves.
We discover most things about ourselves in the reflection of other human beings.
From birth through childhood, into adult relationships, we form much of our sense of belonging and meaning in the world through those in our environment.
We modify our behavior, adjust our perspectives, and grow into self awareness from the responses by those around us.
That is how we learn to walk, talk, and grow emotionally.
Through all of this we are alone.
Not isolated, but alone.
Some of us never experience our aloneness.
Some of us fear it.
Some of us are lost without being directed by the external road map of others’ response to our being.
While we are an interactive species with needs like touch, communication, and a sense of community, we don’t live in puppy piles.
And even puppies wander away from the pack at a certain point.
When they do return to the pack, they have better hunting skills to contribute to that collective.
The romanticism of “togetherness” that is instigated by survival needs, and promulgated into unrealistic ideals by poetry and cultural influences can contribute to our feeling abandoned or isolated when we are only alone.
We are still a part of the meaningful crowd even if we recognize our aloneness within it.
But there are so many factors involved in the language of aloneness.
This is the part where I post a link to a previous blog:
LEA KELLEY SAYING THANK YOU FOR... 
profound.
Its funny I should see this picture you did of solitude. Joyce my wife has just gone to Illinois to visit her friend with my daughter Charlotte amd her friend has just had a baby and was going to be for the first time “alone” with him (its a boy), if you could indeed say that you are alone with your child, but of course it can feel like you are alone when your husband, -of course its not like you really are alone when you have a husband as well by your side – but her husband had to go on a work seminar for a weeek for the first time and he was going to leave his wife alone to look after the child and I am alone here now too…….loneliness is being WITH people as well as without….and even sometimes when you are with them….I really like your painting.
You can’t truly know yourself until you have spent some quality alone time–a LONG time–with your own soul and being.
How is it that you see into my soul, orchestrat the words that express what I sense, in a way that comforts, always with such impeccable timing! LK, you continue to dazzle!!