The life of loneliness and isolation generally brings calmness, because all the senses are calm. As our saints say, the senses are the access to thoughts.

—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit, Vol. 1

Learning the difference between needing solitude and craving the safety of keeping others at arms length can point us toward what we might actually need. Learning the difference between loving alone time and feeling more comfortable not letting others in can point us toward where our practice might be. Learning the difference between honoring our introverted-ness and not wanting to do the vulnerable work of cultivating healthy relationships can point us toward both the wound and the answer. This has been a lifelong note to self.

Lisa Olivera, Ten Things, Part Two

This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

The curse of loneliness

Oh, my dear friends, all the people around you, in your home and outside it as well, need you. There is a terrible curse in our life, which afflicts many people, the curse of loneliness. You remember that woman who killed herself at the age of seventy because, she said, there had never been anyone in her life who loved her. Many people live shut away in their loneliness, and often there is no one to show them a little love. Everyone around us, poor and rich, small and great, needs us. Let our life be characterized by loving care, tenderness, and compassion. Let us live close to others, and for others. As one of the ascetics says, ‘our foundation is our neighbor’, which means that the criterion of our spiritual life is found in those around us. We should love others, not out of any presumed ‘goodness’, but out of a sense of responsibility which we have towards them. 

—Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra

As persons, we are so constituted that in our minds, hearts, and personalities, we are insatiable, bottomless wells, capable of receiving the infinite.  God made us that way so that ultimately we could be in union with infinite love and life.  Because of this, there can be no fully meaningful and final solution to our loneliness outside of union with the infinite.  Therefore, in this life we are always lonely.

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“What does that mean concretely? It means that, to the extent that we go through life running away from our own loneliness, we put a cellophane covering over our own depth and riches and live instead at the surface of our minds, hearts, and personalities. For John, this is probably the biggest problem we face in dealing with our loneliness. We are too frightened of it to enter into it. The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves.”

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Loneliness can also spur us on to new heights of creativity. It is no secret, for instance, that many of our greatest works of literature, art, poetry, music, and philosophy arose from the depths of someone’s loneliness.

…

I would like to illustrate this by using as an example a very creative person of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard, the father of modern existentialism. A very gifted and prolific writer, Kierkegaard always saw his own loneliness as a creative pain, something almost to be deliberately cultivated and nurtured. For him, living in loneliness was part of a vocation from God. For this reason, among others, he refused marriage, even though he was deeply in love with someone. He sacrificed, as he saw it, married love so that he could continue his vocation of loneliness. Many of his works arose out of his own loneliness and, for that exact reason, speak deeply healing words to his readers.”

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

There can be no final solution to our loneliness in this life.  No amount of partying and drinking, pleasure and travel, fame and fortune, success or creativity, indeed no amount of genuine human love and affection, can ever fully take our loneliness away.

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“The Hebrew scriptures see sin as the prime alienator. 1 In their view of things, frequently when we find ourselves lonely, it is because of sin: our sin, other’s sin, or the sinful condition of the human race. Sin, since it helps destroy love and trust that can bind us together and replaces them with selfishness and distrust that help drive us apart, perhaps more than any other single force serves to alienate us from each other. Sin causes loneliness. The Hebrew scriptures see this as happening in several ways. First of all, sin alienates because it destroys our proper harmony with God. Loneliness results because we are now not in proper relationship with what is fully real. Moreover, this state will inevitably destroy the proper harmony and relationships we have with each other, as well, for when we are out of tune with God, we are by that same fact out of tune with others. No one can break the first three commandments and hope to keep the other seven. In this sense, sin of all kinds makes for loneliness.”

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness