I called out in pain, but no one answered. Gosh. It sounds like a drama, right out of a movie or perhaps part of an epic novel, doesn’t it? But in reality, it’s my life sometimes. I think all of us have been there.
We somehow feel as if we are totally alone in a crowd of people or perhaps we go to share a point and no one understands what we are talking about and we feel somewhat psychologically naked, don’t we? So I think at this point, it is very important that we draw a distinction between loneliness and solitude. I’m of the belief that ultimately in the world, I am alone. And of course, I want friends and I want family and I want intimate partnerships and relationships. Of course.
But they are all external to me with the exception of my relationship with God. Gaia, the universe. This is a being that I can converse with because they understand my innermost thoughts. But if I attempt to parlay those into something larger at times with friends or confidantes, I can be misunderstood. So then we come to the ultimate question, who must I be friends with first?
Who? And the answer is, of course, myself. I must develop a relationship with me. Now this relationship will be somewhat naive and somewhat foolish at the beginning because I really won’t know who I am. But over time, through introspection, meditation, prayer, I will find out who I am and then I will discover that I’m also filled with flaws, things I don’t like about me.
Perhaps these are spiritual things or intellectual things, perhaps education. I don’t have enough education or I don’t like my body type. I want to strengthen it. Whatever it is, I will realize that I have the great challenge in my sphere of consciousness of raising and enhancing the beautiful me and this will take quite literally a lifetime. It’s going to take a lifetime to develop the beautiful me.
And along the way, I will meet wonderful people and I will have wonderful conversations and I will fall in love, God willing, and I will have those intimate relationships that every man and woman truly wants that is displayed in the romantic novels and in the movies. Right? It’s all very real. But what they don’t tell you, the caveat to all of that, is that all of those external relationships, tragically perhaps, but they are ultimately external to me, to the self. And they will go.
They will disappear. They will change. Hopefully, not in a horrid situation but people who are such a part of your life will go away. The person I always allude to in my books, in my stories, is my grandfather. My grandfather was there until I was 15 years old and then he was gone.
And I, gosh, at the time, I really didn’t quite understand how valuable he was to me. And he also had a very good friend, Richard Dick, that was close to my grandfather and probably similar to my grandfather. So after my grandfather passed away, he tried to write to me. He wrote to me these long, long letters. He lived in Montreal, I believe, and I lived in this little village on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
And he tried to write to me but, you know, gosh, I just never wrote back. And then after a number of years of writing, he wrote and he wrote these long wonderful letters and never responded. And then he stopped because he too passed away and disappeared. So youth is wasted on the young as they say. I was not really very conversant with reality at that time and I just missed the point.
I missed the point that these individuals wanted to pass on some real gifts. Took me a long time even to figure out what my grandfather had spoken about when he was alive. But I maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be in a sense. We’re supposed to be foolish and not knowing and slowly we must learn to uncover the self. You know, at some point, the remarkable thing I think that comes to all of us is that some point we wake up.
I was about 20 years old or so and I woke up and I suddenly realized, wow, I’m alone. I’m alone. It’s up to me what I do with this piece of life and I could choose to do nothing at all. Nothing. I could have easily been a workman at the time, made good money, met a girl that I probably never would have understood, married children, etcetera etcetera and lived out a life without ever knowing.
But after I had that thought that I could really learn, I think like most people that have similar thoughts, you can never go back. The problem with life is that the minute you open the door to the self, you can’t close it and you realize that my gosh, it’s a much much bigger world than I’m currently occupying. You know, I think I was younger. I was about 15 and in this little village I lived in, there was a bookstore opened owned by a local teacher by the name of Dick Latimer. And in his bookstore, he directed me towards Kafka.
Who’s Kafka? And I read the metamorphosis. You know, the story of Gregor waking up in the morning and being a cockroach or a bug anyhow. And I felt just like that at that time. I felt like a bug abandoned.
Nobody loved me. I was the ugliest boy in my class. It no girlfriend, etcetera. Poor Leon, etcetera. And it just went on.
Then I realized eventually, wait a moment. The only person who can truly teach me is me is me. So stop bemoaning the fact that you don’t know anything and get on with it. Get on with it. And I eventually did because it is very very easy as we’ve often said.
It’s very very easy to be unhappy, hard to be happy because that requires a lot of work. So think to yourself, in those moments of solitude or those hours of solitude or those days of solitude, they are really a portal to the self, to me. I can learn to open the door to me in those moments of solitude. This is not loneliness and all of us experience loneliness at the pit of our stomachs. It burns and it hurts.
I wish I were with someone. Right? You feel lost. But once again, we have to learn to deal with that as frail human beings. If we want to learn to grow, we’ve gotta be like the old stoics in that sense.
We’ve got to learn to be strong, have to learn to be strong. We wanna grow, we wanna learn, and then we can give back to our fellow man. And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is necessary if we’re going to overcome this sense of loss and loneliness that will pull us down and destroy us, and critical thinking is great. It’s great to help us grow. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.