How Not to Be Lonely

I always move my thoughts inward, searching for connections, imagining the neurons and various fluids with multi-component chemistry circulating within me, which together form the multicellular whole of my personality. Its nature makes it impossible for me to be alone among people, even strangers, distant, unknown ones. I always think about them, I am with them, and in some way, I identify with their existence. They settle into my memory and create our shared world. I don’t remember their faces, the emotions emanating from their eyes. But thanks to this, I unite with everyone in their daily work and being. They are waiters, cooks, drivers, nurses, and all those whose professions or private lives I will never know.

Where does loneliness live? In hospital rooms, in the hearts of suffering children, terrified and not understanding the world. But can the world be understood? Is the suffering or loneliness of mattresses tied with chains, on which invaders commit rapes and pass death sentences? Do we feel loneliness due to a lack of prospects, living in totalitarian systems, when we are abandoned and forgotten by our loved ones?

I am not afraid of loneliness. Instead, my life is ruled by responsibility, which permeates my entire personality. I sleep, wake up, live, and breathe with responsibility. I believe that responsibility creates happiness. It releases energy that radiates both outward and inward. Just like suffering and loneliness, it has an infinite range of colors, events, deeds, moments that create bonds between people. A simple smile, an ordinary nod, opens up a vast catalog of relationships that connect me for a fraction of a second with another, unknown person. How good it is to feel kindness, warmth, compassion, and a helping hand. A wide range of daily gestures creates a space to which we can snuggle and let ourselves be carried away by dreams.

Warmth, Kindness, Connection

The world also requires great deeds, enormous work and effort from those who are able and called to do so. This does not mean that those who do not create great things are unimportant or inferior. Every detail, every small part of our community contributes a shared strength and value to all. The contempt with which life is put at risk results from the dehumanization of the magnificent structure of our body, which is an extraordinary building, a structure whose mission is life. When love, responsibility, and empathy fly away from a person, only ordinary matter remains. But can matter hate and do evil? Yes, that is exactly what matters – mindless, uncreative, grinding itself internally and spewing lava that creates a scorched landscape on the slopes of the volcano of hatred.

Life is made up of countless particles that form a whole. Every ordinary and extraordinary element is responsible for marking the hour, the period of our lives. In the limitations of our existence, we have different chances and opportunities, and therefore, we must understand inequalities, both those resulting from the outside and those that unknowingly compose our personality.

Am I afraid of loneliness? And what is fear, trepidation? When loved ones are terminally ill, we can feel fear. But also compassion and empathy. And Paul Bloom is wrong in claiming that, according to the definition of empathy, we should also feel negative emotions. According to him, if someone is angry, an empathetic person should also feel the same anger.

I think that empathy consists of co-feeling suffering. Imagining what a person who is suffering feels. In addition to the empathy we feel, we feel compassion. And while empathy and compassion are the essence of our humanism, the pragmatic and most important form of humanity consists of responsibility. That is, in helping, enriched with selflessness. This is what clamps our truly human existence.

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