Notions Within

Is it possible to feel truly alone and lost amidst more than 6.6 billion people?


Sadly, it is.

The most unfortunate loneliness must however be those moments when you are empty within.

It’s a feeling difficult to explain to those who have never experience it personally, but it is akin to having a space of nothingness inside your very soul.

This space is almost like a vacuum, and it would not hesitate to suck you in deeper into despair if nothing is done to arrest this desperate cry from the tedium that would normally afflict our lives every now and then.

God knows I’ve felt this a number of times in my life.

Perhaps it’s a feeling that afflicts those with a softer side to their personality.

Perhaps not. I wouldn’t know for sure but I’d love to have the late Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) analyse some recurring dreams during those dark days of loneliness.

In it, I was swimming in, or gazing into, a crystal clear ocean fill with all manners of ocean life, all of which would pay no attention to the stranger amongst them.

The dream would have no particular catalyst, or plot twist; unlike horror movies where all the calm and serenity are just a prelude to a gory fest of blood and gore.

There are no words, but you could literally feel the cool breeze (if I’m watching from above – a bridge, a quay, a cliff) and the cool touch of the sea (when I within).

Another dream of far less recurrence has me high up in the sky, watching or witnessing billowing clouds; coming together in bold strokes of a master painter with the bright blue sky his canvas.

All are beautiful sights I felt blessed to be lost within.

I was in heaven and hating the moment of my waking up to a destitute world; one fill with greed and selfish interests, pain and suffering.

Often I forget – then - that it is also a world of hope, of love and beauty, and that it’s not the world’s fault that it turned out the way it did after centuries of abuse.

I have but only recently found the strength and courage to accept this reality after rediscovering my faith.

This faith is the anchor that ties us down to earth.

Loneliness might be beautiful at times, but it is never real and always a fleeting pleasure.

Heaven (on earth, at least) is in finding the little things that makes everyday worth the seconds and minutes that passes us by.

George Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie (1886)