All alone in a busy life

Wednesday 3rd June, 2020

I am a letter man. I love to write them and I love to receive them. I find it invigorating, challenging and therapeutic as well as fun to share my thoughts and actions with friends and to do so in a quiet meditative way. I think on the person to whom I am writing and gear the contents of my letter to them individually. It is especially rewarding if I am also answering or responding to a letter from them. No rush but a reflective rumination on happenings and thoughts as well as comments on world, national and local events. 

When I receive a letter I read it again and again often writing comments in the margins as well as underlining what particularly catches my attention. I write many little notes and annotate frequently.

I do not dismiss emails, texts or telephone calls or apps of various kinds but just that letters are my joy at present. I relish reading books of published letters from the past and from personalities and figures of all sorts. 

Two particularly powerful and thought provoking letters from friends arrived last week. I have responded to one and am in the process of re reading and pondering and annotating the other. 

Commenting on a friend's depression and grief the correspondent wrote: 'one of the things that is helping some people right now is the thought that no-one is having a great social whirl, therefore there is no feeling about being left out or rejected'. 

That sentence struck home forcefully. How often I have heard of loneliness not being so much alone as feeling outside a group or not sharing an affectionate rapport which others in a group seem to do. As my great Aunt often quoted that one can be especially lonely in a crowd. 

I can recall stories of school playgrounds where children feel vulnerable and scared if not part of a fellowship. The basis of gang culture is partly so as not to feel the outsider, the oddball, the scapegoat but rather be part of a group. A friend told me her son when telling her he was to divorce said to his bewildered and saddened Mother 'I am so lonely in the marriage': she understood.

I have attended parties and clubs and even church services where I have felt left out, not part of the community or the various cliques. I noted with sensitivity the solidarity and laughter and bonhomie of those others. 

My most lasting positive impression of Alcoholics Anonymous was their immediate warmth of reception and sincere inclusivity. The bond of the shared disease, of the shared problem and the awareness by all of how alcoholism is such a lonely addiction makes the members considerate and sensitive. 

One BBC news item this morning was headlined as ' The man who sheltered 80 U.S protestors'. In Washington D.C. Protestors over the killing of George Floyd were being corralled as police blocked off streets. A local resident saw this from his window so went down to open the front door. In poured the protestors ( there was a remarkable video of the incident). They were welcomed and stayed over night covering every inch of the apartment. His comment was that they were all strangers to each other and to him. They did not know each other. They were of all types, races, ages, background and yet came together as one. " It was so American " he noted for he sees America as the land in which all peoples of whatever hue, belief, origin, social position, sexual orientation, age come to live as a community, a nation, a people. " It gave me a lot of hope" he said. Once the demonstrators had gone the news of his action spread. Letters, notes, flowers were left on his door step admiring his opening of his home to the stranger. One man interviewed, who was a professional cleaner, came, he said, to help him clear up his home for ' what he did touched my heart'. 

No one should be left out, no one should be rejected for we are all human.