“I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.”

—Andrei Tarkovsky, A Poet in the Cinema

“Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

We may not be aware of it, but we always have a chair pulled out for the surprising demands of our hearts. Happiness, loneliness, fear, sadness, anger – each comes as an unexpected guest. Each moment contains a new arrival. Instead of turning them away, according to the Sufi poet Rumi, we should extend our hospitality: “Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

When unpleasant forces enter our lives, we often shut them out. When we send these forces away, we have lost an important chance to grow. Instead, we should admit them as guests to our table, because they can teach us how to become more conscious human beings. When we welcome, entertain, feed, and listen to our unanticipated emotions, we become better at regulating and respecting our feelings, and we aid ourselves in development as people.

Welcome the Unexpected

“There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for any cheap or even the most banal camaraderie, for even the slightest inclination to choose the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We are unspeakably alone.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they’re only going to know how to be lonely.”

—Sherry Turkle, Connected, but alone?

Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. This gets reported in the media with great lament. “Strangers communicate better than spouses!” It’s a good headline, right? I think it entirely misses the point. The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families.

Kio Stark: Why you should talk to strangers

Such loneliness is not felt only by those who are alone, but is experienced painfully by those who are surrounded by crowds but have no real interior connection with other people.

Loneliness and Union with God

Loneliness is not something we need to be bound by throughout our life as Christians. It seems to me that when we feel lonely it is not because we are alone, but because we have no loving and life-giving connection with others. We are not able to give and receive of ourselves freely and without fear or hesitation. This means that our relations with others are either absent, and merely a matter of external transactions. Or that they are always expressed with a sense of need, of seeking something from others to satisfy the longing within us, and so are not experienced as freedom and self-giving love.

Loneliness and Union with God

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”

—Charles Bukowski