About the Pain of Loneliness

We are all suffering beings.

We come into this realm to learn lessons.

This is a part of that teaching. Hopefully, we will learn it this time around.

The lessons are painful, and that's how we learn.

How can we learn from pain? You might ask.

All the ancients assure us that is the case. Even the Buddha. As a matter of fact, the first precept of Buddhism is “Life is Suffering.” Thankfully, if you follow the lines below that text, they also say, “There's an ending to such suffering.”, and no, it doesn't mean when life ends.

We have heard it before, maybe forgotten, but we have. “Life isn't fair,” or ”Life sucks”, etc. etc.

Point is, we learn with every fall, every disappointment, every heartache. We hate it when it happens, cursing everything and everyone, but our innate wisdom knows it. “That too shall pass.”

Those are hard lessons, for sure, but anything valuable is worth the suffering involved.

Ask your grandma; she knows…

Ask anyone who has lived a little; they'll tell you.

Maybe your parents would too. Or maybe not. Maybe they're too young to have realized it. Play it safe, don’t ask.

Life is filled with pain. Pain is a message. Evolution requires pain.

It is painful for us to learn and to teach those who are lost in anger and resentment. Lost in the otherwise incomprehensible form of human existence.

Then we have the pain of loneliness, so powerful that sometimes we prefer it over the physical kind, any time.

In our desperation to avoid it, we make many mistakes, some with extreme, hard consequences. Sometimes involving others who never saw it coming. The innocent ones that we bring into the world. What have they done to deserve suffering? What lesson is there for them?

And yet, there is one. Possibly more; we just don't see it yet. After all, some of the greatest masters in the art world came from broken homes or other such misfortunes. Some of the most brilliant writers, too.

Who's to tell?

The Bohemian artists, for the most part, don't define it as ‘loneliness’. Time alone is the term they prefer. Sometimes, it feels like loneliness, but it's something else. People can be exhausting sometimes.

In times of war, or not, on military deployments, friendships of circumstance happen constantly.

In some of those cases, people would meet and marry within weeks of getting to know each other.

Yes, some think they have to do it now or take the chance of ending up alone, so they make a terrible compromise. Experts hardly ever recommend such unions, and studies would agree.

Many others take their chances in bars or online. Except for a few lucky ones, both come with their own set of problems.

One thing that is true is that these days, we have a lonely society. Too lonely to be normal. It's a phenomenon and an aberration at the same time.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact cause why it's happening now, but if we put our minds to the task, we can figure it out.

Generations ago, people didn't have the Internet. That's got to be one of the issues. A biggie, too. Another is distrust. We have become too cynical, and for good reason. We see negativity before anything else. If not, our friends will surely tell us. We see it happening all the time. Lack of trust, fear of getting hurt, or a combination of both.

Is it reasonable? Who is to say?

Are people being too cautious unnecessarily?

Many go to therapists to seek answers or to make sense of the type of life they're living, but rarely do they leave their office satisfied. More often than not, the most they get is the next appointment date.

No script will tell us the solution to today's problems. We'll have to figure them out ourselves and have enough presence of mind to know we aren't alone in dealing with them. Millions are suffering in this very moment, to different degrees, but from the same source.

And it will continue to be this way until we find the root of our issues, because distracting from them is obviously a fool's errand.

And that, we must learn, first and foremost. But realizing we aren't alone in this struggle is an important part of growing and evolving.