Love and Loneliness
A friend of mine, after the passing of his mother, said something I often think about: “grief is just love with no where to go.” For him, the line between grief and love is razor-thin.
I wonder if a similar line can be drawn between loneliness and love.
As the holiday feelings fade, I think that the sensation of loneliness may be more common than most care to admit. I’m not referring to the loneliness that stems from scrolling social media or seemingly non-stop engagement with our phones: I’m leaning more into the sense of loneliness that comes when love doesn’t seem as apparent or present.
The type of loneliness that arrives in our souls when moments of community and connection seem few and far between.
The loneliness that creeps in when:
Slowly eating home-cooked meals with loved ones is replaced with scuffing down the same meal every night in 10 minutes.
Chatting about nothing in particular with a cup of coffee in the living room with family is replaced by a not-entirely-interesting Netflix series.
A walk in the park with a loved one is replaced with a text message asking how their day went.
As I feel moments such as these fade further and further into the past, the deeps pangs of loneliness become more frequent and intense. Loneliness seems to replace love. The love that only comes from taking a few extra moments to appreciate the different assortment of flavors in your mother’s cooking; to notice the different cantations in your grandma’s your voice; to look at my father and wonder what his life was like before I arrived.
These moments of love, often experienced during the holidays, fade away and loneliness bangs through the door of my heart, filling the empty space. It feels like loneliness has captured love, and what we feel is love tearing at the bars, desperate to break free. This places loneliness as the adversary, something to be avoided and cautioned against.
But loneliness may, when truly inspected, just be a reminder that we once felt love, and wish to feel it again. Maybe it’s not so much that loneliness is love with no where to go; rather, loneliness seeks out love to make it whole.
Loneliness is a desire for the love we once knew.
When I returned home after the holidays, far away from my family and friends, I woke up each morning with this feeling of loneliness. A lack of love. It felt like a deep sadness that was hard to shake. I wanted to go back. I wanted to move backwards in time and sit down with my parents again. And after a few days of wallowing in self-pity, I resigned myself to the understanding that I can’t go back.
And that presents a challenge: I don’t want to feel the melancholy of loneliness every morning, but I can’t go back to the way things were. (Past a certain age it seems unreasonable to be living at home eating all your parents food and drinking copious amounts of coffee.)
The solution to these feelings of loneliness is to show the type of love you once knew (and whose absence creates loneliness) to those around you. Loneliness asks us to pursue and create feelings of love we once knew. In the act of creating love for others, we may just stumble upon it ourselves.
Maybe I can’t enjoy a meal with my family, but I could reach out to a friend to grab a bite to eat.
Maybe I can’t sit in the living room with my dad, sipping tea, chatting about his day, but I could strike up a conversation with someone on the bus to work.
Maybe I can’t go for a walk with my family, but I could smile at the person I walk past on my way home.
These things are not the same as deep moments of connection with those that know us deeply. But they are little acts that can help us get more in touch with the love that we feel around the people who know us best. The feeling of loneliness can help us inch closer to love.
I understand that loneliness isn’t something anyone wants to feel. It seems to slowly strip away at the walls of your heart — like water running over rocks in a river. With time, it wears down even the largest rock to grains of sand.
But perhaps we can start to see that loneliness is connected to love, and not something to be avoided at all costs. Maybe loneliness is not love with no where to go; maybe it’s a reminder of the love we once knew, and an invitation to create that love in new a way.