Loneliness is an Essential Part of Growth - Whether We Like It or Not

Loneliness improves concentration and cognitive functions and is actually conducive to self-development, identity consolidation and heightened creativity. Love the poetry of Mary Oliver? She was not exactly a social butterfly but I swear her time spent in the fields with the butterflies and God’s creatures sparked her creativity and has healed my heart with her beautiful writings on many a day when her words were the thing that got me up and going.

The Handbook of Solitude emphasizes that loneliness can help us gain insight into ourselves, have therapeutic benefits and can help us deal with political and social pressures. They report that those who experience loneliness are able to form better and more lasting relationships than those who have not. AND...loneliness can immunize us against future social isolation.

Maybe we are not experiencing an epidemic of loneliness so much as we are experiencing monophobia - a fear of loneliness. Maybe we are incompetently treating what ails us with increasing and intensifying contact with others. Maybe our problem is less about loneliness and more about our inability to cope with alone time.

Consider this: If you are not your own best company, what do you want/need to change about you? If you chase after everyone, how are you nurturing the small cadre of people who have demonstrated how much they want to be in your company?

If we can let go of fear of loneliness, we can perhaps pay more attention. Are there people in our life who we need to let go of? Maybe the relationship has run its course. Or maybe, upon reflection, the mutual relationship was perhaps not as solid as you thought? Remember that some folks have more to take and less to give. Sometimes that person is us. But we absolutely do not have to feel obligated to live in one-sided relationships. And each of us gets to decide what that means to us, depending on our own temperament, maturity, and capacity for wisdom.

Now, the exception clause. Sometimes people you love are suffering and unable to pick up the phone and call or respond to your reach outs. This is not personal and no offense or judgment needs to be expressed. Our work is to decide, after long and hard consideration, prayer and soul searching, if this is the end of a relationship or a time to hang in with your friend. It can go either way. But if this friend has been a good friend in the past, maybe this is the time when we extend them the grace they have so often extended us. After all, no one has a friend for a while without having to extend grace. In situations like this, we try not to be a stalker and we work hard to manage our own feelings of loss. We find ways to reach out that are not too burdensome to our friend. We do the best we can. They do the best they can.

Just remember: there are worse things than loneliness.

Love one another.

A new year offers us the opportunity to reflect and consider our future selves. Inevitably, we all have different perspectives on resolutions and such. After the year our world has just experienced, it might be hard to muster unbridled enthusiasm and optimism for 2021. Good.

We don’t need it. The endless possibilities; the big dreams; these are not the things that build character and resilience. In the future, it is far more likely that the suffering of 2020 will stimulate creativity and spiritual awakenings the likes of which art camp and retreats could never accomplish.

Suffering is an essential part of growth - whether we like it or not. I am not suggesting we seek out suffering - that’s masochism. But I do hope this allows us to think of our suffering as something we walk through, not run from.

Do you have regrets? A boatload of remorse? Ok. Tempted to blame others? That’s normal. Trying to pretend that you DON’T feel these painful things? Sounds about right.

If 2021 is going to provide us with growth and maturity and wisdom, there is one crucial question we must ask ourselves: What pain are we avoiding? T. S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

But some humans learn that bearing reality is actually a super power.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness. Cheryl Strayed

Let’s pray….

Jesus said this one time to a group of people. Read these verses and imagine him saying this exact same thing to you:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30 NIV

What Does Spiritual Maturity Look Like?

Resistance to loneliness as a spiritual concept may have to do with the lack of research clarity around social isolation as opposed to the FEELING of loneliness. It turns out that deep dives into the data around loneliness points out correlation but not causation.

These mega data dumps indicate that lonely people often live shorter lives. But that does not mean it is the cause. Maybe people in poor health have less energy or inclination to maintain contact with others. Perhaps these folks are dying of poor health and loneliness is a consequence of their disease not the cause of their death.

Take for example a 2012 study that reports that Denmark’s inhabitants are among the happiest and longest living populations in the world. And guess what? They have a high rate of loneliness (30% according to Keming Yang’s book Loneliness: A Social Problem).

Now, why does this matter?

Because if we identify loneliness as a problem, we might seek to solve it with magical potions and scary warnings to NOT BE LONELY. And what if we “cure” loneliness? And what if “loneliness” is a necessary component of developing maturity? Oops. That would be a bit of a snafu. We might end up with an entirely different sort of problem with even fewer people to serve as spiritual guides for souls interested in seeking after a faithful life. More personally, we might be blaming our loneliness on our spiritual malaise instead of taking the time to inquire about what spiritual fulfillment means, how it really feels, what thoughts we actually have along the way and how it changes our behaviors. Maybe, I am suggesting, spiritual maturity looks wildly different than we ever considered.

At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving them.

Luke 4:42 NIV

The Inevitability of Loneliness

Just to review, I’m (Teresa) exploring this idea that what we have historically thought of as wisdom and maturity and how to acquire it may be...not quite right. I’m suggesting that we rethink what the experience of spiritual growth is versus how we imagined we would feel once we achieve it. As an example, I am picking on loneliness and our notion that it is a bad thing. I’m going so far as to suggest that loneliness may be an inevitable part of growing up. The reason I suggest this is partially because the book of Romans keeps reminding us that our culture gets it wrong and we often go along with its current hypotheses about life without thinking.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:

Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Romans 12:1-2 The Message

Loneliness has become a cultural bad boy, like gluten or wearing hose (not leggings). In 2017 Theresa May (British prime minister at the time) appointed a “Minister for Sport, Civil Society and Loneliness. Health experts in Germany declared an “epidemic of loneliness” and called for an appointment of a commissioner for loneliness (to eradicate it, not promote it, I presume). Scientists are even working on an anti-loneliness pill to reduce or even eliminate the feeling of loneliness!

I wonder if we have all gotten just a titch off course.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.

Mark 1:35 NIV

Resisting New Patterns

…What if I become something I don’t like, what if I become one of those people that I never want to be, whatever that might look like… I am willing to take the risk at the thought that maybe it is better than what I am…

~From the video series By the Book. Click here to view.

If we have ever felt the need to make a change, in order to actually accomplish a life realignment, I have news….IT WILL REQUIRE ACTUAL CHANGE. And it turns out that our brains hate change. Our brains love habits and patterns. Habits reduce the energy it needs to produce to do what our body is asking it to accomplish. When I walk, I do not have to think about how to walk. I’ve practiced walking so long that I just do it. Meanwhile, my brain can go smoke a cigar and sit on the porch rocking away in contented abandon to thought or action. My granddaughter is not at the stage where her brain can smoke and rock while she walks. She has to concentrate. She has the tiniest, cutest little feet ever. She isn’t tall either, but the girl is solid. When she walks, she spreads her legs wide to maintain balance. She works so much harder to walk than I do. She takes long naps in response to her walks. I can walk for hours and not grow weary.

When our brains identify a pattern, it rewards us for this identification with a shot of dopamine. This feels good. Is the brain just over-producing dopamine and doing a dopamine dump to rid it of excess? No! It is rewarding us for identifying a pattern, because patterns, once learned, allow the brain to rest. Here is the really interesting fact - the brain does not care if we have correctly identified a pattern. The brain doesn’t care how well I walk, so long as I walk well enough to do so without conscious thought.

Does the brain like change? No! If you do not like the way your life is shaping up, you are going to need to override your brain’s desire to smoke and sit on the porch. You might need more naps. I’m totally serious - change is stressful. But it may be necessary in order for us to live the life that brings us peace. Are you ready and willing?

…I don’t know what is hurting me and what is helping me... I don’t know about any of it, not just the using but all these other things in my life. I’ll just say here’s the whole deal, I’m willing to let all of it be changed by this process…

~From the video series By the Book. Click here to view.

Learning to be fully human

Have you ever felt like you were giving up your right to choose the life you want to live? When I feel this way it is usually because something is standing between me and my preferences. Each morning I have several rituals that I use to center myself and start my day as a person who is in long term recovery with a commitment to being “turned” and placed on a path that leads to life. Not just any life - but a good, decent life. A life where I do not have to sneak or hide or lie or cheat or steal.

If I had a nickel for every time I thought or someone else said to me, “It’s my life! I get to live it MY way!” I would be a wealthy woman. The problem with this kind of thinking is this: When we have this kind of attitude, what we are really doing is constructing a personality, not becoming a full and whole human. This construction project began the instant we were born. We observed how folks responded to us. We listened to what our community valued. We evaluated and compared and competed for attention, affirmation and resources we thought we needed. We have pretended, we have played games, we have turned ourselves inside to get attention, approval or resources to live a life of our own making. This is fantasy living and it is as unsatisfactory for building a decent life as cotton candy is for providing a nourishing meal.

Recovery helps us remember and reconstruct our lives. When we “turn”, we do so knowing full well that we turn to a God who has our best interests at heart, who knew us before we were born, who knows how we are created and what we are created for. He gets us better than we get ourselves.

“If you don’t go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don’t deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.”

~ Matthew 10:38-39 The Message