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If you type in the words will I ever into Google the first thing that comes up is: “Will I ever find love?’, the second is- “Will I ever be enough?” and the third is: “Will I am net worth? We go from love to money real quick but behind that initial question- ‘will I ever find love’ is one of our deepest human fears. BEING ALONE
And the fear of being alone was instilled in us at an early age. Remember that kid who played alone in the playground? They were the loner . If you had a birthday party and the cool kids didn’t show up you were considered unpopular.
And today even as an adult if you go to a wedding without a plus one, everyone looks at you like ‘oh poor you, are you okay?’
We’re scared of being alone. Even when we’re alone, we’re not alone. We find a way to stay busy. Studies show we consume up to 34 GB of data per day. One post online said that it is like reading ‘The Hobbit’ every single day. Nearly 100,000 words per day. Now if you’re not a Hobbit fan, it’s like streaming 25 episodes of Stranger Things. If you’re not a stranger things fan, it’s like playing over 15,000
hours of Fortnite per day and if you don’t like Fortnite, it’s like scrolling 94 hours on TikTok every single day.
We’re not alone even when we’re alone. Philosopher Paul Tillich once wrote that in the English language there are two words for being alone but we only ever use one of them.
Lonely- the sadness of being alone, the pain of being alone, the weakness of being alone, but there’s another word that we rarely use.
Solitude as he called it the strength of being alone, the glory of being alone. The difference between loneliness and solitude is the lens through which we see our time alone. Monks and sages and wisdom keepers for thousands of years have talked about the importance of spending time in silence, in stillness, alone.
In one study men and women were asked if they wanted to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or give themselves an electric shock. 27% of women chose an electric shock and 65% of men chose an electric shock because they didn’t want to be alone with their thoughts.
Being alone with our thoughts can be scary.
So I want to give you three experiments to try over the next 30 days.
1. Try and schedule at least 10 minutes every single day for the next 30 days that you spend by yourself. Not with your phone, not with a laptop out, not with an iPad, not in front of the screen, not even reading a book. See which thoughts arise and then after it take the moment to reach out to a friend, a family member or a person that you’re close to in order to share what came up for you.
2. Take yourself out. See if you can muster up the courage to go on a solo dinner date. To go and watch a movie that you’ve really wanted to see by yourself. Giving yourself that experience to enjoy your own company, to sit in the discomfort of what other people might think and what might they project on you because of what you’re doing, I promise you that this builds resilience and confidence. That discomfort is so important for self-discovery.
3. Sit with this question: what’s something that’s really important to you that you’ve been devaluing lately. What’s a priority in your life that somehow has been deprioritized. Sit with that question in stillness and silence and see what comes up for you. Whatever comes to the top and rises, make that your focus for the next 7 days.
I can’t wait to see what you learn from this experiment. Share your answers in the comments below and I’ll see you on the next video.
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प्रिय मान्छेलाई एक अन्तिम लेख | Suman Bhattarai | Nepali Writer
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