It is this most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine after all. John Lennon says: “Feel your own pain,” but how hard that is!
In 1973 the Educational Television Network showed a series of life portraits of a family in Santa Barbara California. This series, which was produced under the name “An American Family,” offered an honest and candid portrayal of the day-to-day life of Mr. and Mrs. Loud and their five children. Although the revelations about this “average family,” which included the divorce of the parents and the homosexual life of the oldest son shocked many viewers, a detailed film analysis of any family probably would have been as shocking as this one. The film, which was made with the full permission and knowledge of all the members of the family, not only unmasked the illusion that this family could be presented as an example to the American people, but also showed in painful details our tendency to avoid the experience of pain at all costs. Painful issues remained unmentioned and embarrassing situations were simply denied. Pat, the wife and mother in the family, expressed this attitude best when she said, “I don’t like things that make me feel uncomfortable.” The consequences of this pain-avoidance, however, were well expressed by her eighteen-year-old son when he said, “You see seven lonely people trying desperately to love each other and not succeeding.”
It is not very difficult to see that the Loud family is indeed no exception and in many respects” average” in a society growingly populated with lonely people desperately trying to love each other without succeeding. Is this not in large part due to our inability to face the pain of our loneliness? By running away from our loneliness and by trying to distract ourselves with people and special experiences, we do not realistically deal with our human predicament. We are in danger of becoming unhappy people suffering from many unsatisfied cravings and tortured by desires and expectations that never can be fulfilled. Does not all creativity ask for a certain encounter with our loneliness, and does not the fear of this encounter severely limit our possible self-expression?
When I have to write an article and face a white empty sheet of paper I nearly have to tie myself to the chair to keep from consulting one more book before putting my own words on paper. When, after a busy day, I am alone and free I have to fight the urge to make one more phone call, one more trip to the mailbox or one more visit to friends who will entertain me for the last few hours of the day. And when I think about the busy day I sometimes wonder if the educational enterprise so filled with lectures, seminars, conferences, requirements to make up and to fulfill, papers to write and to read, examinations to undergo and to go to, has, in fact, not become one big distraction-once in a while entertaining-but mostly preventing me from facing my lonely self which should be my first source of search and research.
The superficial life to which this leads is vividly portrayed by Henry David Thoreau when he writes:
“When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.”
The first task of any school should be to protect its privilege of offering free time-the Latin word schola means free time-to understand ourselves and our world a little better. It really is a hard struggle to keep free time truly free and to prevent education from degenerating into just another form of competition and rivalry.
The problem, however, is that we not only want our freedom but also fear it. It is this fear that makes us so intolerant toward our own loneliness and makes us grab prematurely for what seem to be “final solutions.”
~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: the Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
