Abhishek Shukla

Loneliness is scary...?

Loneliness is scary. It is one of the primal fears of us tribal beings. We seek company and we do our best to keep it. We participate in ceremonies, let go of our individuality, and at times, bear with what usually might be unbearable for us. And for what? To keep people around us, to make sure we don’t become unsocial, or worse, anti-social. Loneliness stands opposite to all those efforts.

It is the act of separation of the individual from the tribe, and just like all other separations, it feels excruciatingly painful. It even feels unnatural. Even if being among people gives you pain and sitting alone brings you pleasure, the former still feels like a better idea of spending time. Something deeply ingrained within us pulls us to people, regardless of their personality. People make do with the company they have in their circumstances and move to find a better one once their circumstances change. They keep doing this forever until their circumstances become stagnant and they can’t move anywhere anymore. And that’s when they discover the idea of a “soulmate” or a “BFF” or “settling down”.

Amidst these changing circumstances, loneliness as a state stands out primarily because of its unchanging nature. It never goes from being something to something else. You don’t rise up to it, nor do you settle down for it. You just discover it once and then it is all yours, forever. It becomes your home that you can keep coming back to once you are tired of the world or once the world is tired of you. It demands nothing from you—quite literally, and that just adds to it being perceived as scary.

The world in general demands something of us; there is always a transaction taking place. You let go of something to gain something. That is the ‘normal’ for us; we expect this transactional way of dealing to work everywhere. Until one discovers loneliness. Now you have a place where this framework doesn’t work. You can get into it even when you are among a crowd, you can settle into it while living the most vibrant lifestyle. You don’t need to trade your way in, you don’t need to let go of something to find your way out. It remains this lucid state of being that enters and escapes you as air does. You might perceive it to be going in or out, but it is always there, within you. And just like air, it demands nothing from you.

By its sheer being, it breaks the societal illusion created by centuries of effort and manipulation. The illusion that in order to exist you need to dilute your sense of individuality and become a clone of everything else around. It reminds you with each breath that you can be You; a person who exists regardless of the world. And it provides you with a space where you can be that.

A space where you don’t need to explain or seek any explanation, where you are already understood. A space where you need no expression because you are already expressed; you can close your eyes and see and hear and feel yourself fully, better than any expression of yours can ever accomplish. A space where you don’t need to filter yourself, nor pretend to carry a point of view that isn’t yours. A place where you don’t need to appear smart or competent or positive, for its fluidity knows no logical dissection. A space where nothing is taboo, nothing is sacred, as everything is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Usually, wherever you visit, a place or a relationship, there is always a need for ‘adjusting’, always a conflict taking place between the existing and the new, the known and the unknown, between the right way and the wrong way. But in loneliness, matters are settled without any need for mediation. There is no conflict; what appears to be conflicting is simply a manifestation of the same You, but in different ways of being. Different versions of You, that you birthed across your lifespan for various reasons. They all exist together, at once, within loneliness, to remind you of the role they played in enriching your perception of the world. They exist to show you the rainbow of experience on which You have travelled for so long. They are all either already in unity, or are seeking unity—and hence, appearing to be in conflict. But not the usual conflict of the world where one fights against someone. No! In loneliness, even if you fight, you fight ‘for’ yourself, and never against anyone.

People misunderstand the battles they fight in their imaginary worlds as conflicts within loneliness. They assume their imaginary world to be loneliness. If you are sitting alone, but in your mind, your whole world is living and playing out its games, is that loneliness? If even while sitting alone, you are still fighting the battles you had picked with the world and are responding to the conversations you had—or wished to have—with the world, is that loneliness?

Loneliness is a state of being just by oneself. All of one’s thoughts and imaginations are directed only towards oneself. It is an act of a person meditating upon and about oneself. It is the ultimate meta-state in which one can exist. A state in which one can look at oneself while finding another self that is looking at this self while finding another self that is looking at the self that is looking at the self, and so on. It can seem crazy to someone who hasn’t been there. It can seem crazier for someone who has just reached there and instead of acknowledging its intricate architecture, is trying to escape it. If escaping had worked, they wouldn’t have reached loneliness in the first place; that’s what they don’t realize.

They don’t realize but somewhere deep within, they live with the firm belief that they are nothing more than an assembly of worldly pieces; their body belonging to the earth, their thoughts and personality to the people and things around them. A person settled in loneliness carries the understanding that they are something more than this. That they aren’t a place on the map, they are the map, and the world is the place within it. They are more than the body and the world they inhabit.

For others, this thought is unsettling, unimaginable, and inconceivable, because for them, whatever they can ever be is all outside. They are playing a game in which unless they collect points and move to the next level, they are missing out. The idea that they can be in a space where there are no levels to go to and no points to gain or lose seems strange. “How can I get something that I didn’t work for? How can it be so easy? It can’t be. They say that anything unearned is bad. That’s why this must also be bad.”

So, when they find themselves lonely, the first thing they feel is sadness. Sadness that isn’t induced by the experience of it, but by the lack of experience of everything they have been familiar with. They expect this space to just be like every other space. And instead of keeping their expectations aside and experiencing this space as it is, they end up assuming that something is wrong with this space, that’s why it makes them feel so horribly sad. And when that happens again and again, they inadvertently train themselves to believe that something is wrong with them.

“Why do I keep getting into this sad state of being”, they first ask themselves, then others around them, then the internet, and eventually the therapist. They end up being in a place where the idea of being left alone by themselves scares them. They keep themselves busy with work, surround themselves with people, and even go to the toilet and bed with their phones, only to escape loneliness. But loneliness lives within them, how long can they escape it? It keeps intruding on their work, keeps interrupting their attempts to run away from it, only adding further to the fear, leading to the point of being afraid to spend even a moment alone.

They do everything possible to manage this fear. From chasing people to buying things to going on vacations to popping pills to consuming drugs; none of them work beyond a point. All they do is put them in a state of lull, where they lose all their awareness and every ounce of individuality—which some of them gladly mistake as being ‘one with the world’. They only push them further away from accepting what’s living within them and makes loneliness even more scary for them, to the point where they can’t bear it, and each moment they spend with themselves gives them pain.

They do everything except what is truly needed: pausing and taking stock of what’s happening within them. Giving their inner world one chance. Allowing themselves some time to figure out that which is living with them. That it isn’t the occurrence of loneliness that’s scary, it is the absence of it and escape from it that makes it scary.

Loneliness is scary. For those who are in a hurry. Who are adamant about playing some game all the time, who are mind-washed into believing that any existence away from the world is necessarily bad, who are more obsessed with the world and less with themselves. Loneliness is unbearably scary for anyone who isn’t willing to listen to the person within who’s watching them. Loneliness is unfathomably scary for those who have discovered it but can’t find a way to live with it.

Notes by Author:

#loneliness #philosophy