“The greatest social need among New Zealanders over the last decade is loneliness.” This was the claim of a social worker in Christchurch who has been intimately connected with the community for some 30 years and has researched it’s needs extensively. Yet his experience and observation are echoed by a number of sociologists. The figures are in: loneliness is bigger than obesity, cancer, diabetes, smoking and even the recession.
Loneliness is a worrying word. It brings other nouns to mind: isolation, fear, dislocation, aloneness and separation. It’s not a word we like to use about ourselves, yet it seems to be and expression a growing number of people utilise when questioned.
Loneliness has the sense of being abandoned, rejected and being unloved. It’s overwhelming. Yet it’s not just people in social poverty; very ordinary people experience loneliness too. Kids at school, adults in their work places, spouses in marriage, politicians and even the clergy. No one is really immune.
These feelings of rejection and aloneness in the world have the troubling effect of leaving us with the fear of being with ourselves. Our modern world is full of people who hate silence and time in solitude. We need people or noise to shake down the walls of feeling lonely. Psychologists suggest the the success of internet pornography is a major symptom of social loneliness. It is one of a raft of social mechanisms used to escape abandonment and feeling disconnected.
The Catholic writer Henri Nouwen claimed that our fear of loneliness has the even worse effect of failing to engage with ourselves as ourselves. Choosing to spend time alone is called solitude and it’s essential for living well. The difference between loneliness and solitude is, “worth”. We are “worth” spending time alone with ourselves. We are that important. We don’t need others to provide our sense of place or value.
Solitude provides the framework for reflection, we get to face ourselves and our fear of being alone. We get to live in our own own space for a while and perhaps that’s the most frightening part: what do we do if we don’t like it?
I have to admit solitude takes a while to get used to. I remember completing a seven day silent retreat. The first couple of days were hard work. I honestly didn’t know where to put myself. There was just me and my thoughts - and they were quite chaotic. Yet by the third day a peace had settled, the discomfort evaporated and I became much more at ease with my own presence. The noise that pervaded my life gave me time to address a few things I had ignored too long.
In the gospels Jesus is recorded as going away for periods of time to be alone. Perhaps it’s age, but I think it is essential to enjoy aloneness for periods of time. When people say to me that God doesn’t speak, I often respond, “turn down the volume and you’ll here in ways you’ve never heard before”.
Perhaps the greatest problem isn’t loneliness, it’s our inability to be alone.
Digby Wilkinson 2009