What I Thought Was Loneliness Was Actually Solitude!

Posted: June 23, 2019

Loneliness – A deep emotion that resonates among the sad, depressed and the lost? or fleeting thoughts that exist only as interludes in an otherwise happy single life?

When the chips are down and the nights are filled with tears, it is that gruelling pain that keeps you from falling asleep. Memories of the past flash before the mind with equal vigour as worries of the future. They bring with them hurtful but needless comparisons with peers who were perhaps blessed with a better life – beautiful home, boyfriend, husband, babies and all things part of the beaten track. The mind uses these to stress the fact that your life is not just different but unfortunate and lacking. As though you were otherwise ordained to follow a script which was not to be.

Yet, in those lonely nights, your determined mind continues to plot ways to make you feel better. Perhaps this means better things for you – a new job, freedom to travel or move to a new place, freedom to go back to school and pursue education or simply a life of joyful solitude! Does this mean that life is happy even if it steers away from the original script? Is loneliness always a problem?

What the mind plots, the Universe makes happen. The taste of freedom is sweet as nectar. Solitude is as calm as still water, fueling confidence and self-power. The new job or the solo trips abroad, the move to a new city or the pursuit of education or sport creates a happiness spiral much greater than the original emotion that steered you there in the first place. Loneliness is thus reduced, to those tiny blips in life’s radar that rarely remind you of the missing romantic relationship which (Oh, Well!) doesn’t seem necessary now. Dates and romantic relationships are often an unintended but pleasant distraction rather than a need.

If only the caterpillar knew that it was always destined to be a ‘butterfly’!

Image via Pixabay