But to extrapolate that reality into the idea that we shouldn’t want to tend to our loved ones, to receive them as flawed and imperfect people and care for them anyway, is a grave miscorrection. We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN
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It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get better.
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It’s driven me to isolate myself, convinced that ritualistic self-punishment and pathetic martyrdom were the only ways I could ever make myself worthy of other people. I realized, though, that I was being a coward. Being alone is hard, to be sure, but it’s also deceptively easy — it requires nothing of us.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN -
When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured. Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering. It is ideal, of course, for us to work to understand those conflicts and thereby make them less destructive to ourselves and others, but we can’t make those feelings disappear; nothing real can have contact without friction. If you’ve been encouraged to define a healthy life as a frictionless one, I think it may be inevitable that a life devoid of contact starts to feel like healing.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN -
I can’t help but feel crushed by the weight of what I owe to my community, certain I’m going to hurt the people I’ve fooled into loving me, convinced that I’m doing them a favour by icing them out until I get my shit together.
no good alone, RAYNE FISHER-QUANN -
Loneliness is that sense of being unmoored and unanchored. It’s really that sense that you won’t be seen or found by the world in the way you want to be found, or by another person.
—Julia Bainbridge -
Mary was a pure virgin, with a harmonious disposition. She loved good works. She did not want to be seen by men; but she asked God to examine her. She remained continually at home, living a retired life and imitating a honey-bee. She generously distributed to the poor what was left over from the work of her hands. Her speech was calm and her voice was low. She wanted to make progress everyday and she did so. She was not afraid of death, but rather was sad, and sighted everyday that she had not yet crossed the threshold of heaven.
—St. Athanasius of Alexandria -
A lively disposition, accustomed to active exertion, soon languishes in solitude and inaction. For a great number of years you have been necessarily much distracted by external activity, and it was this circumstance that made me fear the effect of the life of abandonment upon you. You were at first in the fervor of your beginnings, when no difficulties appear formidable.
—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress -
Do not suffer yourself to get excited by what is said about you. Let the world talk; do you strive to do the will of God; as for that of men, you could never succeed in doing it to their satisfaction, and it is not worth the pains. A moment of silence, of peace, and of union to God, will amply recompense you for every calumny that shall be uttered against you. We must love our fellows, without expecting friendship from them; they leave us and return, they go and come; let them do as they will; it is but a feather, the sport of the wind. See God only in them; it is He that afflicts or consoles us, by means of them, according as we have need.
—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress -
I understood loneliness from the perspective of a whimsical, wandering seeker; one who had never been quite in sync with the people around her. I longed for deeper, enduring connections than the ones I knew. I had always felt different and isolated; other people were mysterious and hard to understand.
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I didn’t see that this life I imagined still entailed absorption in work and an obsession with my own reputation. I couldn’t see that this was not the solution to my loneliness.…
“It is a loneliness I can live with because it is not an end in itself; it is merely a reminder of our true, great end.”
The Solution to the Long Loneliness? Love. -
“And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.”
―Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
SO GOOD QUOTES 