“We are unspeakably alone.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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“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.
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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.
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“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
—Charles Bukowski -
“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone.”
—Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running -
“I thought also about how content and comfortable I was being single, how much control I had in my life, how I could go out and get applause anytime I wanted and then retreat to the green room of my life, eating Oreos and waiting for my next performance.”
—Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy
SO GOOD QUOTES 