From loneliness to aloneness

Loneliness is my shadow. I’m loneliness. If these two phrases sound depressing or negative to you, you are arriving at conclusion too early.

I’m around three months away from completing 33rd year of my life, and the idea of loneliness in my mind is equally adult. I remember bouts of loneliness that I experienced at the age of 10. The unbearable pain of not being understood at the age of 14 is that which put me on the unending path, which I traverse today. There have been many attacks of loneliness after 14, but this post is not about MY loneliness at all. This post is about how, while trying to understand the root of my own loneliness, I inadvertently reached those roots that belonged to others. Loneliness, I realize, is a ghost with different faces. It’s the same ghost for all, its roots are same too, but it looks different to everybody. And that shallow uniqueness is what makes life a mystery for each of us.

This post is about someone whom I have known for a couple of years. She is a good example of a loving daughter, caring wife and mother. A woman who makes everyone happy by doing things that all like, because she believes it’s in others’ happiness that we find our own. She has been doing it as long as she remembers. This is what she taught her kids too – that they should do what makes others happy.

But then, while life was going smoothly (at least on the surface), a stranger who was not a stranger really, arrived in her life. They became good friends. He was moved by her patience, tolerance, and ability to love and forgive. She found in him a mirror that showed her the Self, which she has been starving since as long as she can remember. He made her realize that what she has been doing to herself is no less than euthanasia.

She argued with herself that her husband loves her as much as she loves him. Their kids are happy, too. Then, what is that hidden Self that she has been seeing off lately? A lot has been going on in her heart and mind, which we logically cannot explain. She knows now that so far whatever she has done in her life is out of her conditioning, and not purely out of love. She wants to live for herself now. She wants to love herself. She wants to live alone so that she can feed her starved self. She wants to be free.

She spends her nights and days in an unending conversation about if it’s all because of the stranger, the young and sensitive stranger who understands women more than women themselves do, perhaps. Or this stranger is just a catalyst? She feels completely detached from her husband, while she knows clearly that the stranger is not her destiny or destination. This stranger entered her life with a purpose, and the purpose was to show her the starving child. In the course, he took care of this starving child like an intimate friend. Perhaps he fell in love, too. Perhaps, she is in love, too. But she knows their love is not that of a young guy and a married woman. This love has no name. This love is of souls, which is rarely understood.

She knows now that she has been suffering from a disease that we call loneliness. She knows that she has been lonely for decades. She understands that even the stranger cannot fill the vacuum that has widened so much. She knows if she depends on the stranger to fill this vacuum, soon emptiness will torment her. She realizes that dependence creates emptiness; it doesn’t get us rid of it.

She knows that from this loneliness she will find the route to aloneness that will make her a hermit. Her journey toward aloneness has just begun. She seems to be preparing for true Sanyaas.

Filed under: Life , aloneness, loneliness