The weight of aloneness

The Dinner At The Ball (Adolph Menzel, 1878)

I remember standing on the stony shore of Lake Ontario last January, a mean-spirited wind ripping across the water, the cold slicing through my coat, staring blankly, taking in everything and nothing at once, and realizing that it would be the loneliest year of my life.

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Part of adulthood, I think, is realizing our aloneness as humans. That we belong to that aloneness, as much as we belong to anything. That it's woven into the fabric of being.

After all, life is punishingly solitary. I'll never walk around in your brain and you'll never walk around in mine. No one else will ever experience the contours of your consciousness, but you. And as much as I listen to you, I'll never fully truly transparently understand. As much as you explain, I'll never know you half as well as I'd like to.

I have all this inside me but, to you, it's just words. Don’t get me wrong, I love words but they're clumsy and confining and fail when it comes to understanding anything important. As close as we can get, brain to brain, heart to heart, skin on skin, there will always be an infinite distance between us. We will always be separate worlds.

At least once a week I think about Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Craning my neck up, I must have stared, transfixed, at the exact spot—where man, reclined back, reaches his limp hand, and God, straining, stretches towards man—for a good thirty minutes, as a gob of people moved around me and a booming voice on the loudspeaker told us dumb tourists to keep quiet. That exact spot of the two hands, almost touching. Close. So close. Almost there. But not there.

Maybe that is God and us. Or maybe that is us with the God in others. Or us with the God in ourselves. Or maybe it’s all the same thing.

There's this unutterable isolation to being human. A captivity we loathe. A loneliness we feel in our nerve endings.

Trapped in our own tiny cranium kingdom, smack dab at the center of creation.

~~~

We are entering the hard months of winter. The days when the cold settles in your bones and can't be coaxed out. When the pale and glittering sun struggles to shine. Slushy streets and frozen fingers, a stubborn chill that won't go away. It's a period of dormancy. The whole world is slow-moving, half-awake.

As I write this, a symphony of snow falls silently outside the window. The sky is soft and gray. The tall cedars shake and sway and shimmy around the breeze. A fire crackles in the living room, the cat curled up on the couch, sleeping, like his entire body is an anvil.

Nothing happens here. Nothing. Part of me loves that, but part of me feels isolated. Far away. On the outside, looking in. Humbled, by my loneliness. It's strange to feel like I miss someone I've never met.

I suspect everyone feels alone, in at least one area of their life. Everyone feels they're being ignored, in some way. Some successful, intelligent people feel alone in friendship or romance. Some stable and rational people feel alone when it comes to fun and adventure. Some people are bursting with beautiful ideas, but no one around them cares about curiosity.

CS Lewis believed our desire to be inside the inner ring, included in the in-group, and the terror of being left out is one of the dominant elements of life. But, it's a mirage. Because there is no arrival, no inside to reach, no inner ring. Only continually living on the cusp, chasing the orgastic future that ceaselessly recedes.

To resist that pull, to be okay with feeling alone or a little left out, is only the result of conscious and continuous effort.

Until we can overcome the fear of being an outsider, we will always feel like one. Until we can accept the fundamental aloneness of the human experience, we will always feel somewhat lonely¹.

And sometimes we need the darkness of winter and the sweet confinement of aloneness to learn what is essential and what can be shed, discarded².

Maybe our endless and proper work is to find belonging within aloneness.

Maybe it's a terrible mistake to act like we're alone.

Maybe we're all alone together.

I wish you way more than luck,

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• I spent the holidays with family, cooking meals together, playing games, telling stories, and exploring old abandoned barns. I think a lot about service and hospitality around the holidays, welcoming guests and doing anything to make their time as pleasant as possible.

• Recently, I’ve been perfecting my brioche waffle recipe, finishing a few old books, starting an equal amount of new books, garden planning, and carving wooden spoons. Writing has been distant and words have been difficult, but they’re warming up to me.

📸 photos i took:

December in Ontario. Barns and boardwalks and birdhouses.

1. It’s the reason art is revered. Great art has the unique ability to make you feel seen, heard, understood. Less lonely. In a stick-to-your-bones way. In a way even human contact, real relationships, can fail to replicate.

2. This idea is inspired by David Whyte’s multiple poems on aloneness.