More than eight billion souls rise each morning to breathe another day—many of them lonely. While others seem to rollick in life’s plentitude, they feel left out.
Loneliness has many strands. Ultimately, it’s feeling you’re disconnected. Or like the world’s hung up on you.
Loss is loneliness’ common denominator. It comes in many currencies: loved ones who’ve died or drifted away, a romance gone sour, schoolmates reduced to memory, a job that vanished overnight, aging, the slow erosion of health
According to a Gallup/Meta survey, 25% of people in 140 countries experience loneliness “very or fairly often.” In the USA, 1 in 3.
Loneliness can be grievous. Even fatal. There seems to be a herd instinct governing human behavior. We like togetherness. Like cows in a pasture, we like facing in the same direction.
And yet the paradox: you can feel most alone in a crowd, the noise of others drowning out your pulse. For introverts like me, solitude grants restoration, not exile. My happiest moments have often come in silence: in a garden, along a woodland path, or beside a pounding shore.
A few days ago, I wrote of three places I’ve been that have sustained me, each of them granting solitude—a chance to reflect, to locate myself, to fish in life’s stream, that rare chance to glimpse Eternity.
Recently, I’ve found someone, Scott Stillman, who shares my love for solitude, writing eight splendid books on this theme. He has a way of putting things:
you are not broken for needing stillness
you are not flawed for shrinking from noise
your mind is simply attuned to something different
something more aligned with the quiet current
that flows beneath all of existence
Brimmings: up from the well 