About loneliness

Hi.

Today started as I had a nightmare where my best friend died (eaten by a dinosaur, but that's beside the point).
After that in my dream I felt a vivid array of sorrowful emotions, like emptiness and aimlessness. Some of the emotions were no doubt caused by (imaginary) death of someone close to you. Like the silencingly heavy burden somewhere between your throat and heart, and the numbness of it all. No one near to me has never died so I can only assume.
But some thoughts and emotions were all too familiar. Like the one where I ask myself: what can I do without the ones that mean to me the most?
I think the idea of being lost without friends is quite a universal one.

My view of the world, existence and humanity is based on a few keystones. Keystones like
"every human is inherently good",
"we should search and strive for truth and harmony"
"only one can truly save oneself",
"a mind should be filled with clarity and not blurred"
"true potential of one's humaneness is only found when with others".
Thus my inner world is not one concrete idea, but rather a web of multiple ones that somehow try to live in harmony with each other. I bet that's like it with most of us.
Some of the ideas are in conflict by nature: At the same time I truly think that we should be independent and autonomous, but also I realize that we can never be, that our need for others is as fundamental as our need to be free of others.

That dinosaur feeding friend of mine and I once had conversation that touched on similar themes. We thought about where we would like to be in future. She painted a life where she is a master of arts, her future filled with empty canvases, buckets brimming with paint and the will to fill the world with beauty and art.
I could not imagine at the time what I would do. I imagined for who I'd be doing it. I didn't know who she was, but she made me happy and gave me a reason to march forward through life's hardships.
My friend wondered this. "Is it not better to find happiness within oneself?", she asked. "If other people can make you happy, they can also make you unhappy. And your happiness should not dependent be on quirks of other people". She made a valid point.
I remember how I back then wished to go traveling around the globe. To find my place in this weird world, but more like a mental place. A home. A place in someone's arms, surrounded by caring eyes of friends.

Some time after that I found Buddhist ideas. I haven't been a good Buddhist recently, mind you, failing to find time to meditate, but I still value their thoughts highly. That all misery and pain in one's life is caused by craving.
And what's a greater craving than the craving to be loved as you are?
What causes more miserableness than the though that you are worthless? Like the Donald Duck comic where he wishes he never existed, as everyone would be better off that way.
What's a greater hole in one's soul than the one that can only be filled by love and care of other person?
What's greater strength than the one found in a group where you feel you belong?

Perhaps a man should be an island, an island of fortitude.
As Simon and Garfunkel have sung it:
"and rock feels no pain; and island never cries".
That I have tried to achieve since the age of ten. In the age of fifteen I realized how much I needed and wanted other people. Thus the conflict, the battle began. Where one part of me just wanted to be beyond the glass wall I once built between me and others.

For the last year so I thought I started to be above that. I felt no lonesomeness. Perhaps I had found a place of my own, one could hope.
But lately, I've felt alone.

Perhaps it's a battle never to be won. Perhaps we should just stand upright against the sea of emotional weight and gusts of hurt. When the world rages around you like a storm, and the night seems too dark too see past, we could just stand laconically in the midst of it.
Like an island.


J.


Another song from Bob.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg-CIka1L4A