The Cool Thing about Existential Loneliness

I had the best conversation with a good friend the other day about existential loneliness (as one does in a busy coffeeshop on a sunny afternoon). By that, we meant a certain pang that both of us experience from time to time, regardless of the fullness of our lives and the closeness of our relationships.

It’s a sense that we can never be completely “gotten” by another. That our way of seeing, our brand of suffering, and the choices that lie before us are ultimately ours alone, born of our individual history, formation, temperament, beliefs, context, etc. (Heads up: few things activate my inner eyeroll faster than the well-meaning assertion I KNOW JUST HOW YOU FEEL.)

No matter how rich my relationships, there is still the sense of being on a path that is my own, that no one else is or can be on with me in just the same way. And sometimes it gets lonely in here.  It’s a feeling that’s different from simple solitude, which is something that I often crave.

Brene Brown believes that the shame that drives so much of our behavior and anxiety is rooted in the fear that we aren’t worthy of love and connection. As a corollary, when we find ourselves feeling the weight of aloneness/loneliness, it can be easy to connect it to a sense that there must be something [shamefully] wrong with us, that we don’t belong in some fundamental way. We’ve been found out.

But here’s the cool thing. Let’s call it a paradox. Whatever our unique brand of existential loneliness/aloneness looks like, there are a lot of us who feel some version of it. So, in a respect, WE’RE IN IT TOGETHER.  We’re a community of loners.

And knowing that, when you find yourself there, you can try this. The wonderful Buddhist nun Pema Chodron talks about the practice of tonglen. She says that when we are suffering and have no medicine for ourselves, one of the paths out can be to send love to everyone else who is going through their version of the same thing. From the Christian path, we could connect it to the widow’s mite—giving even from our own need and brokenness. That act opens our hearts and can evoke a sense of solidarity through compassion. If you believe in the power of prayer (whether you assign to it a supernatural or energetic basis), it feels like you’re taking effective action. Whenever I have remembered this practice, it has never failed to help me feel less alone and less helpless.

Finally, we may not know exactly what each other is going through, but we can get closer to the mark. We can listen. Creating safe space for others to speak of their particular loneliness and sadness is such a boon, to the giver and receiver. Perhaps even more important than grasping the other person perfectly is the implicit statement of our receptive presence: You’re worth being heard. You’re worth making time for. That in itself is powerful medicine and contradiction for the shame-pain of isolation. And, in turn, receiving another’s suffering can reassure us that our own is not so unusual.

Let us be together in our aloneness.

PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD

Yesterday, as I was driving, a new Mercedes Coupe pulled in front of me with a booming ALL-CAPS bumper sticker:

PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD

Something about the stark presentation made me think that the driver assumed that it wouldn’t go so well for me (and most of those who read it).

Instead, I thought, “Cool! This is going to be epic. I’ve been waiting for this MY WHOLE LIFE.”

On the other hand, maybe he was just warning us that he’s a really bad driver.

The Day Everything Changed

I wonder if, like me, you sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that one day you’ll wake up CLEAR, DETERMINED, and ENERGIZED, and that’s The Day That Everything Will Change. Your newfound focus and insight will make the goals that seem hard right now so easy and inevitable.

However, with few exceptions, I don’t think it works that way. Instead, I think it more often happens on an ordinary day pretty much like all the others. A day when—hopeful, uncertain, dusty, and maybe a little bruised—you whisper a short prayer and take a first tentative step into imperfect action. And then you stumble your way to the next one. And you Keep. On. Going. Knowing what you know, right where you are, in the body you already have.

A day, that is, pretty much like today.

Sh*tty First Drafts

I was struggling mightily with some copy I had to write the other day. (Question: Is it technically “struggling” if you’re just avoiding it altogether?)

What finally worked: I created a large-font header that appeared at the top of every page of the document–

REALLY SHITTY FIRST DRAFT

It worked like a charm–or better, a potent laxative. The words just flowed out of my head and down my leg onto the page.

Remembering Dad

My father died today. Well, more accurately, on this date four years ago. Our family affectionately refers to it as The Day Dad Got His Motorcycle.

I didn’t often tell Dad that I loved him—just often enough so that I knew that he knew it. In fact, one of the ways I loved him was by not telling him explicitly, to spare him the clear awkwardness he felt after receiving that communication from another man (or at least from me). A career military officer, he was a creature of his place and time, and he was never going to be as comfortable with such expressiveness as I was, given the hippie-dippie personal growth communities I hung in. The unspoken contract between us that I [mostly] honored was this: Yes, I know you love me and I love you, but for God’s sake could we please not have to say it?

In that vein, one of the most difficult things I ever said to Dad was that I was gay. That didn’t come till grad school in my early 30s, only after I had finally accepted it myself through a slow and painful process. I clearly remember that night in my parents’ living room. It was Christmas break, sometime in the mid-90s. (You’d think I’d have the precise year locked down, but no.)

I spoke The Words, and he was quiet for a long stretch, staring at the floor. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, Buddy, I’ll be honest with you. It’s not the news I wanted to hear. But, you’re the nicest guy I know in the whole world, and that doesn’t change.” Given where he had come from, that was a pretty awesome place for us to end up. And while he was never a PFLAG-waving zealot, he was also never anything less than completely welcoming to my various boyfriends over the years, and he never questioned my path or tried to dissuade me from it.

I have many other memories of my father–some of them painful, which shaped me in hard ways. But today, these are a few of the images that come easily to me:

• The night he stayed up late to inexpertly sew the patches on my scout uniform before my first troop meeting

• The reassuring scent of his Old Spice as I leaned my sleepy head against his steady shoulder in church

• How at dawn he would stand at the door to my childhood bedroom and sing the “Good Mornng to You!” song in his gravelly off-key baritone and then tickle me till I got out of bed

• The grin on his face as he walked down the LAX concourse towards us after returning from another tour in Vietnam

• The night in junior high when he took me out—just us two guys—to see my first R-rated movie

• The way his voice caught and how he hurried out of my room when he saw the picture I was holding of Charlie, our sweet Boston terrier that had gone missing

• The small fold of bills that he would secretly and inevitably press into my hand as I left home after a holiday visit

• The blue-and-white-speckled metal camp mugs of steaming coffee we shared at the table in my uncle’s cabin in Montana one quiet snowy morning

I wish he was still around, so that I could gingerly not tell him one more time how much I loved him. Hey Dad. You know what? Yeah, that. I know it, too.