Loneliness — Hive

What is loneliness? Perhaps this is when we do not let anyone in your soul. Or maybe it comes when we are keenly aware that nobody needs our soul. Sometimes both options are connected.

Or maybe it's just a man’s awareness of his being? I am, and truly, experienced, I only know what I am. Therefore, I basically, existentially one. Perhaps Sartre or Camus would answer that way. But in this answer is missing something. And better to say, Someone.

We continue to look for the answer.

Loneliness is suffering. Indeed, in loneliness you always remain alone with your pain. And, probably, a large part of humanity will put an equal sign between loneliness and suffering.

However, in history there have always been people who themselves were looking for loneliness. There are many of them writers, artists, musicians. They run away from the world in order to subsequently give him the fruits of their solitude. Brilliant music that we admire. Pictures that collect millions of people around him. Books, striking depth of thinking. All this is born of creative loneliness - and it is always accompanied by the inner suffering of the artist.

Geniuses are people who seek solitude and at the same time suffer from it. All others also suffer from loneliness, but run away from him.

The human soul naturally desires to open itself to someone, share itself and feed from another soul. But at the same time, letting a person very close to him, we feel inconvenience due to the invasion of the holy saints of our heart and the inevitable bitterness of misunderstanding.

Schopenhauer described this situation in the famous "porcupine dilemma". When the porcupine is cold, they press against each other to warm themselves. Sensing the pain of needle pricking, the animals scatter, but soon freeze and come together again, gradually finding an acceptable distance. So the internal emptiness and cold push people towards each other, but, having received mutual wounds, they diverge - in order to come together again when loneliness becomes unbearable. Secular politeness and generally accepted culture of behavior is nothing but a safe distance between our loneliness.

In general, Schopenhauer has simply crushing aphorisms on this subject, as accurate as bitter. For example: "The sociability of people is not based on the love of society, but on the fear of loneliness." Or: "Each person can be himself only while he is alone."

We will not be asked in the next world how they loved us here. Ask if we loved
Along with the development of megacities, the strange phenomenon of loneliness in large cities was widely spread. It turns out that the larger the crowd, scurrying around with you, the sharper can be the blade of solitude, cutting the heart. Why? Because you understand that they live their own life, not your life. A huge number of “not you”, who don’t care about your person, persecute the soul in proportion to their number. The more “not you” around, the more lonely you feel.

If in this faceless crowd there is someone who thinks about you and is waiting to meet you, then the feeling of being abandoned and useless seems to go away. But someone else's love is like a drug. The more you use, the more dependent. On the other hand, you get used to it and value it less. The true victory over loneliness depression comes when you learn to love others and give yourself to them. So it was, is and will be. Any psychologist will tell dozens of stories about how their patients have overcome the internal crisis through serving others. And indeed, we will not be asked in the other world how they loved us here. Ask if we loved.

For someone who is inclined to think and loves to learn, loneliness can become a school of self-knowledge and knowledge of God. If a person retires, reduces the message with the world to a minimum, three possible options for the development of the situation await him. Either he does not stand up and interrupts his peace, either he goes mad, or intense inner work begins in his soul.

I remember the wonderful story of Chekhov "Bet". A wealthy banker and a poor young lawyer argued: if a lawyer sits in solitary confinement for fifteen years, he will receive two million rubles from a banker. Having settled in the outhouse in the banker's garden, the young man went through several stages of development. The first year he missed, read novels and detectives, played the piano. In the second year, the music ceased, and the hermit demanded a volume of classics. In the fifth year, the prisoner asked for wine, the piano sounded again. Books during this period were not read. In the sixth year, the lawyer began to scrupulously study foreign languages, philosophy and history. After the tenth year, the sage spent his days and nights reading the Gospel alone. Then books on the history of religion and theology were requested. In the last two years of solitude, the recluse read indiscriminately. Five hours before the end of the fifteen-year term, he left the outhouse, thereby violating the bet. The note he left was told that he no longer needed the millions. Years of loneliness, spent in self-education and self-knowledge, led to God and resolved the question of the meaning of life.

And now the case is not from literature, but from the life of a very famous person - the last ataman of Zaporizhia Sich, Peter Kalnyshevsky. After the abolition of the Sich, the 85-year-old Cossack was sent to the prison of the Solovki monastery, where he spent 25 years in a close solitary cell. He was let out three times a year: at Christmas, Easter and the Transfiguration. After pardon, 110-year-old Kalnyshevsky refused to return to Ukraine and remained in the monastery. He lived in Solovki for almost three years, spending most of his time in prayer. Now glorified as a locally venerable holy Zaporizhia diocese.

“A person ripens alone, in a cold emptiness, in which a person is clear: he has to be born and die alone. In this emptiness a person begins to pray. And then the emptiness is filled with God, the past life is comprehended, the eternity becomes obvious ”[1],” writes the modern preacher.

Loneliness shows us who we are and makes it possible to fill the gaping emptiness of the human soul. Whether it will be filled with God, or the rattle of TV, or the flight from oneself to the mazes of social networks - we decide for ourselves. But there are examples in history that can help us make a better choice.

When the Lord comes to a man, he is no longer alone
There is also a special loneliness - monasticism. Loneliness and monasticism are in some way the same words. Monasticism - from the Greek word "monos", which means "one." This kind of voluntary loneliness is defined by the words: and God. Monasticism is me and God. And it is better to say: God and me. If monasticism is such, then it becomes a genuine and only excuse for loneliness. However, what does a layman interpret about monasticism? It is like a beautiful, but closed treasure chest. You can admire. You can not feel and understand, remaining in the world.

However, St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) wrote about "monks in tails", that is, about the laity who lead a real gospel life, who know about intelligent prayer and other exploits not only from books, but from personal experience. And St. Theophan the Recluse can find similar thoughts. The saint himself sent from the gate letters to a certain landowner-layman asking for advice in prayer making. Subsequently, the great preacher and writer, Archpriest Valentine Sventsitsky, developed the theme of "monks in dress coats" into his idea of "a monastery in the world." So loneliness, filled with God, is an ideal attainable even outside the walls of the monastic cloister. Only then, probably, it is better to use the word "solitude". When the Lord comes to a man, he is no longer alone.

We can never completely avoid loneliness, but are able to meet God within him and get out of the shell of alienation towards people. And most likely, there is no other way out of the problem.

Do you want relief from years of torture loneliness? Become indispensable for at least one person in the world. Serve someone who needs help. Understand that happiness is to be useful.

A hospital, a prison, a nursing home, an orphanage are the places that help to turn from philosophers into laborers. Within these walls, the very quality of our loneliness changes. In any case, despondency and depression are guaranteed to make room because there is simply no time for them.

Loneliness is inevitable. It is a constant companion of any individual on all the paths of his being. This feeling is allowed by God and is normal for a sinner who has fallen away from the Creator. A branch breakaway from a vine will always feel its inadequacy and loss. Whether a person is happy on earth or deeply unhappy, he will preserve the natural, ontological experience of loneliness as personal uniqueness and personal pain - the very “I am” until the end of days. We are always aware of the abyss of our soul, destined for the infinite God. The abyss of the abyss invokes the voice of your waterfalls ... (Ps. 41, 8).

Loneliness is necessary. It gives self-knowledge and exposes the age-old pain of the sinner Adam, who hides from the Lord to this day in the bushes of his loneliness. From under these branches one must go out to meet the Creator and His creation. Yes, walking along this path can be even more painful than sitting in the Adam bushes. But only on this road the abyss of our soul will find the One Who can fill it, and will meet those who carry the same depths inside. “Call to the Creator from the pit of your heart, and He will fill your limited infinity,” says solitude to us.

For this meeting, the incessant voice of loneliness sounds in us, and for her we live on earth.