how to fight loneliness and find inspiration therein

After my divorce in 2006, I listened to the Wilco song, "How to Fight Loneliness" at least three times a day.

It was a balm and a gateway to access feelings I tend to shut off from myself and, as such, I found it incredibly helpful in processing that deep-well of grief and loneliness in which I had found myself.

Ever since, I've looked for clues as to how others combat loneliness, particularly within the worlds of art and religion. Here are a few I've gathered over the years, starting with one of my all-time favorite novels, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," a book I first read shortly after my divorce actually.

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.

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I also adore this line from Maggie Nelson's poem, "Motor Inn," because it reminds me I'm never truly alone. 

...Once I thought
I might be lonely, then I knew
my mind would always
​talk to me.

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And finally, I've been inspired by a book of sermons from Paul Tillich called “The Eternal Now,” that I recently picked up at the library. 

The first sermon, to be honest, is what drew me to pick up the book in the first place. Titled “Loneliness and solitude,” it starts with a passage about Jesus withdrawing from the crowds that had followed him by going alone to a mountain. 

Though I was familiar with that particular story, the full weight of Jesus needing alone time hadn’t settled on me until now. Tillich helped me along by showing how solitude and loneliness are parts of not only the human condition but that of every living creature, too.

“Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone.” 

What’s more, Tillich argues, it is this very nature that gives us hope for transformation:

“This is why God Himself cannot liberate man from his aloneness: it is man’s greatness that he is centered within himself. Separated from his world, he is thus able to look at it. Only because he can look at it can he know and love and transform it.”

Finally, Tillich suggests, the only way to conquer loneliness is to embrace solitude and there are many ways in which to seek solitude.

“Each way can be called ‘religious,’ if it is true, as one philosopher said, that ‘religion is what a man does with his solitariness.’”

One of those ways is the desire toward solitude of nature.

“We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.”

Another way is through poetry, listening to music, or looking at pictures with sincere thoughtfulness, he says. 

What about prayer? Nah. 

“Better that we remain silent and allow our soul, that is always longing for solitude, to sigh without words to God."

So, let us go forth, as Tillich challenges us, and “dare to have solitude—to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves.” 

Doing so, we might just find ourselves and new creative inspiration:

There may be some among you who long to become creative in some realm of life. But you cannot become creative without solitude. One hour of conscious solitude will enrich your creativity far more than hours of trying to learn the creative process.

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