Dear Fellow Traveler,
Do you ever feel isolated or misunderstood? Despite our deep connectedness, loneliness is part of the human condition. But loneliness is not to be confused with being alone. One can be alone without feeling lonely and experience loneliness in a crowd.
Interestingly, we all have parts of ourselves that no one truly understands.
In my conversation with Dr. Kelly Flanagan (author of True Companions), he explained that loneliness is one of the most misunderstood words and experiences in the human condition. Flanagan stresses that “loneliness is not abandonment, shame, or isolation.”
How do you make sense of loneliness?
Are you comfortable being alone?
In his classic Man’s Search for Himself, the American existential psychologist Rollo May observed,
Part of the feeling of loneliness is that man needs relations with other people in order to orient himself. But another important reason for the feeling of loneliness arises from the fact that our society lays such a great emphasis on being socially accepted. It is our chief way of allaying anxiety and our chief mark of prestige. Thus we always have to prove we are a ‘social success’ by being forever sought after and by never being alone.
What if this cultural influence to “never be alone” is actually hindering our development and spiritual maturity?
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