Using Loneliness

Natalie Goldberg writes a chapter under the above title, in Writing Down the Bones. She writes of her own confrontation with being alone and lonely after separating from her husband, and of how she learned that loneliness was also a time of activity. She had been complaining to her Zen master of how hard it was to be alone, and he asked her what she did when she was alone: “Suddenly, it had a fascination” (149). She kept track of how she filled her loneliness.

My recurrently sporadic “activity” around the concepts of “alone” and “lonely” several times in my life, so far, has been to fantasize all the time about being alone, with no thought of the parallel condition of feeling lonely.

The two states, alone and lonely, are named from the same root, of course. Ironically, the root, according to my dictionary, is the Middle English concept of “all one.”  But the two are distinctly different states:  It is possible to be alone and feel complete, adequate to the occasion; the feeling of loneliness is that one is not enough.

“Alone” can be rather attractive. In fact, it is possible to seek and even crave the state of being alone, on your own, solo, living in solitude. It is especially possible to seek that state in an overly eventful life. I realized that one year, taking a Management Effectiveness Training workshop that among other things explained why I was marginal management material.

One of the exercises was to imagine a ship, and to staff and populate that ship deck by deck with friends and others who needed to be part of your voyage. And I realized the only ship I wanted was for a crew of one, equipped for a solo sail around the world. There was no one I wanted to share it with. I just wanted to be left alone. And I had no experience with sailing.

At that time I was effectively working two jobs. One was a fairly contained and boring day job looking after the library of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, a small daily newspaper.  The other, the night job, was the very public one of reviewing theatre and books in the same newspaper, writing some magazine features, and otherwise having my name and voice out on display all the time. I couldn’t go shopping or walk downtown on a Saturday afternoon without seeing somebody I knew, or running into someone who wanted to talk.

At first that felt pretty good--the satisfaction of being a modestly talented fingerling in a manageable pond. Then I began to doubt that talent and to detest that level of visibility--the need always to be “on.” That was probably part of it. I realized later that I had also been going through a depressive state at the time—I realized that when I was going through another, bigger, one later and had to go for treatment. And what I had been experiencing was a kind of painfully crowded loneliness—the kind it is possible to feel only in a crowd you cannot connect with or find much joy in.

Or sharing a small house with a spouse on a different journey. I think my first wife married me partly because she was afraid of being alone, and afraid of feeling lonely. I married her because she said she would marry me, and we were a pretty dynamic and passionate pair at the start. She divorced me when she realized there were worse things than being alone—and being lonely in a marriage was one of them. We had gone our separate and lonely ways across the yawning abyss of a double mattress long since. Being alone together with someone else in a shared space full of memories of more companionable times and activities is a devastating kind of loneliness. It proved harder on her than on me, so she called a halt first.

So suddenly there I was: alone.

Separated.

And lonely.

In one sense it was a state I had helped orchestrate. The alone part was maybe okay—but the lonely part was a shock. I would walk the city, looking for company that somehow suddenly seemed disappointingly elusive. Was I running into fewer people? Not really. I had not really been running into so many, previously: it had simple felt that way.

I was also unemployed—or seriously underemployed and underpaid, scraping together a living from free lance writing and part-time library work. That’s a different kind of loneliness. Suddenly every advertisement on tv was an insult to my sense of myself as a consuming member of the educated, professional adult middle class. Not only did it feel like I would never again have friends or friendly company, or even again have sex; no, worse, I would never again buy anything foolishly expensive and undeniably unnecessary.

Now I live in Edmonton, a city in which even after 27 years I have little public presence and no real “friends,” none I can drop in on for a laugh at any time. Well, not quite none. I have the friendship of my wife of over twenty-five years. Eva is a woman of amazing resilience in the face of my recurrent but less and less frequent downers. She has friends, and so “we” have many acquaintances, usually maintained through her outwardness.

But as I considered Goldberg's invitation to muse about the state of solitude and the activity of loneliness, I began to realize I have not craved the solo life much in the last many years. That’s a good sign, because one day soon enough, it looks like, Eva and I will be retired together.

It was sad watching my parents’ marriage go apparently suddenly and irretrievably to hell once Dad had to take early retirement, at 60, on stress leave. (I say “apparently suddenly” because the tensions had probably been there for years, but manageable. And I had been out of the house for years, so had not witnessed the slide.) So he stayed home and drove himself and Mom crazy. And maybe in self defense, she helped return the favour.

I won’t be quitting work until closer to 70 (not getting on the pension plan till 59 has had something to do with that). I can’t see quitting at 65 to be home alone, eating ceaselessly while trying to keep busy and entertained while Eva is still at work for several more years.  

In fact, in my much more private life as an educator, even the once relatively attractive idea of being alone has lost a lot of its sparkle. Even if for practical purposes, because of committee commitments, I am still doing two jobs.

As for the idea of feeling “usefully lonely” so I have to manufacture busyness, it has no appeal at all.