MIND MOVES:The social nature of the season often accentuates the feelings of loneliness we all experience, writes Tony Bates
"All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?"
AT THE close of a question and answer session recently, in those dying moments of dialogue when the audience is mentally working out the fastest way home, a man asked me something about loneliness. I gave him a rushed, and not very satisfactory, answer.
He had painted a poignant picture of our country today, where people, he said, were very lonely. The issue he raised was a fundamental one, and I thought it deserved deeper consideration.
For many people over the Christmas season, loneliness cuts deep. Ironically, there is something about the highly social nature of the season's festivities that can accentuate the experience of being alone.
When the social agenda is to eat, drink and be merry, anything you feel short of pure bliss seems to confirm your deepest fears that you are some kind of misfit. And that sense of being so out of step with everyone around you can arouse strong feelings of isolation and loneliness.
The word "loneliness" often conjures up an image of an emotional state or a human affliction that suggests something is "wrong". Perhaps a more helpful way to think about loneliness would be to consider it as a legitimate emotion that has something to teach us.
Feeling lonely reminds us that we are fundamentally and inescapably alone. Ironically, it is only by coming to terms with this that it becomes possible for us to experience genuine connections and healthy intimacy with others. In listening to and getting to know our "loneliness" we find we are not alone. All of humanity has gotten there before us.
Loneliness is one of the ways that we come to know ourselves and get in touch with the compassionate side of our nature. The people in whose company we feel safe and accepted are often people who have struggled with painful periods of loneliness and have found in themselves a depth of love for others that doesn't need words.
It helps when we feel lonely to respect the experience and read it wisely. Sometimes it is not asking of you that you come to terms with existential or absolute truths about human nature. It is simply prompting you to take time to make a better connection with yourself and with other people.
The feeling of loneliness may be telling you that you need to simplify your life. In the run-up to Christmas, in fact at anytime in the year, we can lose the balance in our lives between work, rest and play. It may be a signal that you are lost to yourself, because of having invested so heavily in one aspect of your life, and neglected other aspects.
Time to reconnect, as the poet Derek Walcott wrote, with "the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart".
Staying in a practical vein, it's good to become aware of the ways we humans can compound the pain of loneliness by building all kinds of stories around it. For example, sometimes in your loneliness you may become drawn into some idealised fantasy that will remove all your pain: the perfect lover, a mystical experience of the Divine, a place where you will feel completely at home, with people around you who you love and cherish.
As wonderful as any of these may be, to focus your yearning on such "perfect'' remedies will make you feel even more sad and deprived, and considerably add to your suffering.
Your loneliness may be prompting you to make a real connection with others, maybe not quite the "perfect'' companion you dream of, but someone who is available to you and who, like you, has lived through lonely nights and knows full well how you feel.
To live in community, to enjoy relationships based on a genuine concern and care for one another is absolutely necessary if we are to remain human. But to live surrounded by other people and share nothing with them but noise and general distraction isolates a person in the worst way. It breeds a painful sense of loneliness.
Your loneliness is part of the drama of being human. Each of us needs to reconcile what can seem a fundamental contradiction in our lives: we are people who have a fundamental need to be with others, and we are also people who in so many ways live and die alone.
Awareness of both these truths gives us compassion for others.
This Christmas, may your enjoyment of the company of others feel as blessed as those quiet moments when you are alone with yourself.
• Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)