The morning dawned over the gulf with a beauty I’d forgotten. For some reason I’d decided to accept an invitation to travel to a friend’s “camp” in Cocodrie.
I never knew what I’d missed over the years.
The weekend was a blend of quiet surroundings, pleasant company and nature at its best. Sunrise to sunset found quietude burrowing into my marrow, seeping into the network of nerve endings grown deadened by daily troubles and problems. They kept me from enjoying life. Life wasn’t fun anymore.
The world was still evident all around me. Television, supplemented by the insane options offered by satellite access and surround sound, tried deafening me with their output. I shut out the noise and found time to hear my thoughts. Hearing myself think let nightfall slide over me like a silk sheet on a freshly made bed. It was a novelty I started understanding.
Being a person normally driven to communicate with my companions on this frail planet I noticed I only looked at life. I wasn’t experiencing it anymore. My viewpoint was stunted and narrowed. It lacked colors all people should appreciate. Standing separate and apart from the world does no good. We become strangers scoping out a strange land. Being separate and apart doesn’t make you appreciative; it makes you a soulless voyeur seeking something you can never participate in or with anybody.
Loneliness isn’t a condition; it’s a self-activated penal commitment and detention. It’s a closeting of the human spirit. Everything in life is confined to borders allowing no more light in than is necessary for survival. Life isn’t meant to be shadowy or on the edge of nightfall. A person’s existence is transitional or evolutionary in its movement along the timeline we call life. It’s meant to be a continual path of discovery of a person’s mental and spiritual constitution.
The composite elements of mental, spiritual and experiential realities are what round the edges of our personal incivility toward us. Depression and paranoia are creeping maladies. They become necrotic, rotting in their own purulent lack of attention if no steps are taken to stem the tide of the disease.
Being alone differs greatly from loneliness.
Aloneness connotes the simple lack of companionship. Aloneness can become an asset if it leads to introspection and self-enlightening discovery. Aloneness is transitory, therefore it’s correctable.
Loneliness is a distancing from more than what’s necessary and normal in its lack of companionship. It’s a self-enforced isolation. A soul hungers and a heartbeat goes unheeded. The nourishment the person needs to continue onward in life is stunted and possibly deluded into believing this abnormal state is the normality to expect out of life.
It isn’t.
Occasionally the child in us needs rediscovery. The child must dance in sun-showers and kick puddles during a gentle rain. Our laughter should sound as easily as a brook passes over the rocks and pebbles in its path; fluidly and effortlessly. Pleasure can be found in life’s light. Remember the coming darkness of night isn’t a threat; it’s merely a reality we use to delineate the transitional boundaries of our day’s happiness.
Life can be good if allowed to be so. But with our continual efforts to succeed, our need for recognition, our desire to be loved and our misunderstanding not everybody is required to so much as like us; we suffer consequences we never expect.
Any person’s individual perception will differ on any given subject; and that includes us. Nobody must accept us as we are. We can hope they’ll like us but we don’t have to take their lack of acceptance as a judgment of our worth as individuals.
Understanding our personal worth is a result of our accepting personal value systems. It comes from within. It’s not developed from what others see, but what we know of our integrity, morality and sense of personal pride. From that point onward we exude the confidence, sensitivity and attraction necessary to cut down loneliness in its tracks.
It was a novelty to see the fiery intensity of sunset illuminating the darkness of my life. Sometimes irony has its appeal.
Thanks for listening
