Finding Yourself
The state of loneliness can be crippling. Though the majority of people don’t find themselves consumed by it, they do feel its effects. Their inner worlds shrink and dry up. For others, the issue looms over them like a specter in the future rather than as present reality.
The only real answer to loneliness is to experience your own fullness. Then and only then can you be sure that you will not look inside one day to find holes, gaps, unanswered fears and a sense of lack. Here are steps that enable you to become true to yourself. They aren’t magic bullets, and recognize that loneliness, like every other psychological state, has degrees of severity. But whether you look on being lonely as a mild or severe issue, the same solution applies. The three steps are given in no order of priority; consider adopting all of them.
Step 1: Have a Vision That You Devote Time to Every Day
Happiness experts often advise that the best way to have a happy life is to have a happy day. The best way to have a happy life is to have a happy day that looks forward to tomorrow. The future is something you build toward, and the place where you build is inside yourself.
Step 2: Put Yourself in a Context for Fulfillment
The solitary life is suitable for very few people; the vast majority prefer social connections.
Relationships reflect who you are inside, which is why the experience of bonding can go from shallow social contact to the merging of souls. If you want to be true to yourself, find the context in this scale that reflects your inner life, and if you don’t really know where that is, consult a friend, a confidant, a mentor or a therapist who can help.
Step 3: View Your Life as a Process, a Never-ending Journey
Lots of people who say, “I want to feel young,” but very few who say, “I want to feel timeless.” As long as you live between the endpoints of birth and death, life is like a conveyor belt heading inexorably for a black tunnel. The only time that never ages is the present moment.
Being isn’t a choice. We all possess it. Yet we spend endless hours trying to escape it. As the poet Wordsworth lamented, the world is too much with us late and soon. We run after external rewards; we feel restless and anxious if we look inward. In essence, we are desperately trying to escape ourselves. When we run out of energy, money, playmates and toys, what happens? Utter loneliness.
Life is a process of finding yourself and living in contentment with what you find. It’s not an expedition to reach a distant mountain peak. The process is at once intimate and simple. You learn to be. This is the highest meaning of being true to yourself.
People will often call these things “losing yourself,” which is true in a limited way: You are losing the ego self, with its cares and desires, it’s restlessness and disquiet. But in a larger sense you are finding yourself. The core of yourself is calm, centered, unshakable and fulfilled.
