I walk the streets around my home. I walk to the swimming pool, down the back path onto campus.
I hear sirens and wonder about who is having such a bad start to their day.
I listen to sound of my sandals unpeeling from sap-sticky pavement beneath the limes, which starts me looking up into trees. It is a still day, and they are quiet. I wonder what they make of everything that passes by beneath their branches. The people going to work. The students to-ing and fro-ing from their lectures and their parties. Children on their way to school. The shopkeepers loading and unloading their produce, opening up in the early morning, closing up at night. The calls between neighbours (of whom I am one) just to check how we’re all doing today.
There are whistles and shouts – a sports match of some kind – people having fun, playing. Or being really competitive and not ‘playing’ at all. I remember my own more sporting days of netball, one hundred-meter sprints, high jump and badminton. I remember the friendships from back then, the troubled friendships of childhood and youth. Good times and the other kind.
I hear “good morning” from the man in the cowboy hat with the aged long-haired German shepherd who mooches along behind not liking the warm, not sure she can be bothered with the walk any more. I hear a surprised “good morning” from a stranger taken aback because I smiled.
A simple blackbird tells the world what he’s thinking about today, and draws my attention to my favourite oak tree on this stretch. I behold you, beautiful one…child of the earth and the sun. Those words always come back into my mind when I pass under this oak.
It’s a simple suburban walk. Fifteen to twenty minutes maybe. I walk it because it is how I get from home to the pool to swim. There is nothing special about it – until I choose to connect with what is special about it.
I choose to notice the traffic and what it tells me about the state of the world. I choose to notice how the path feels beneath my feet, what the corner shop has in its veg lean-to, the guys going about their business, how Hadija is looking this morning, how she sounds when she struggles to put how she’s feeling into English words.
I peer through the cemetery hedge and notice a new burial in a section I think has been dedicated for Muslim interments. I’m assuming they bury their dead. I don’t actually know. I wonder if I could ask. What we do with our dead, might be what separates us, that we all have to face that eventuality is part of what unites us. My godmother died this week. My cousin will be dealing with all that hurt and pain that any of us who have lost a mother know all about.
In the garden on the corner, a family sit outside – as they do – in pyjamas and dressing gowns, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and quietly talking about whatever it is. It is only a murmur from where I pass the edge of their plot. I hear the pig-like dog scurry over to the fence, and not bark.
There are snippets of student conversations...he said, she said, and would you believe…but a fluttering or a scurrying brings me back to the trees, to the birds, to all the wild things that grow along the verges and hedgerows where financial constraints have stopped the council or the university cutting out, all this wildness and beauty that survives by default…and now we are making a virtue out of necessity. That makes me smile…we pretend that we intended this…when really we simply couldn’t afford to do otherwise. It’s beautiful all the same.
And maybe we couldn't afford to do to otherwise might mean two different things.
This is where I live. This is where I walk day in, day out. I know very few of the people who live here, and yet we smile and we ask how it is and we say “good morning” as both a greeting and a blessing, wishing each other such a thing. We respond to smiles, and wonder why someone doesn’t. We look at the grass growing and the trees that have been trimmed, and talk about the weather because these are things we share: the grass, the trees, the weather. And the alkanet and the wild garlic and robins and blackbirds, crows and ravens, magpies and jays. The roses might be in someone else’s garden but their beauty doesn’t stop at the wall. It’s a good year for the palms that I’ve never noticed flowering before, and for the wisteria that I have.
People I speak to regularly call me ‘darling’ and ‘love’. We don’t know each other’s names, but we notice the gaps in our passing our regular routes. Belonging isn’t always about intimacy or even sociability. It isn’t necessarily about being known, it is just about being seen. And heard. And when we see and listen to others – people, animals, birds, trees, the grass, the land we all grow out of – then maybe they listen back.
All of the work that I read on well-being, and the lack of it, sooner or later throws up the idea of “connection”. A quick on-line search shows loneliness frequently cited as a higher-risk factor for
premature death than causes that might more readily spring to mind, like obesity. I’m no expert on the study data, and so wonder if maybe, it isn’t the loneliness that kills, but the behaviours we indulge in, in order to numb the feeling. When we feel lonely, we don’t necessarily behave in health-enhancing ways. We do the opposite. And we do that partly to fill the empty space, but also because we feel ashamed. There has grown up a crazy idea that only losers get lonely. Well, hey, here's the big news guys: we all get lonely!
I think it’s very important that we recognise that. We ALL get lonely. Loneliness is not a state of being. It’s a feeling, a mood, a situational thing that we can address. Sometimes we address it by just letting it pass. Sometimes we need to get active about it. We need to understand why we feel lonely – what kind of connection are we low on? How can we top it up?
Let’s start with an important vocabulary shift in talking about “lonely”. Words are phenomenally powerful. It matters which ones we choose to use, so I want to emphasise that whatever is going on in your life, lonely is not something that you are. It is something that you feel.
You are a whole host of amazingly wonderful things, just by virtue of being alive. You have achieved a whole host of amazingly wonderful stuff, just by having got this far. You have amazingly wonderful potential for who knows what in the future. Guess what? That doesn’t make you immune from sometimes feeling lonely. The good news is that there are things we can do when it hits.
Connection is the cure for that lonely feeling.
But what kind of connection? Are we lacking intimacy, or social interaction, or community, or belonging to a tribe or family? Just to cloud the waters, we can have all of those things and still feel alone…outside…lonely. It isn’t enough to be in relationship to others, they have to be the right others, it has to be the right relationship, there has to be congruence, and complementarity. Alignment, sharing, and reciprocity.
Those would be hard enough things to achieve, even if we could have it all our own way and, naturally, we can’t. People are tricky. All of us. We have our moods, our wants, our needs…we don’t always align with the version of us that others want or need us to be. Yet somehow, we seem to manage. We do forge connections, friendships, partnerships, love-relationships, passing interactions, and deep bonds. Sometimes that happens all on itsown. Sometimes we have to work at it. Sometimes we have to wait for it.
And in the meantime, we have a life to live.
However, there is one more form of connection that we can consciously tune into without having navigate the relating-to-others waters. We can choose to connect deeply with the world at large.
Do what I did, what I do (when I remember), what I spoke about above. Consciously connect with what is around you. You are connected, but making that connection a conscious one, a "noticed" or "acknowledged" one, makes it so much deeper, and it can help in making us feel much less alone.
Take a walk, or find a place outside where you can just sit for a while. It doesn’t matter which, walking or sitting, maybe even swimming...but probably not running or cycling, it needs to be a slow thing, or a still thing. It also doesn’t matter where. You can go out into the wilderness, or walk down a city street. You can sit in the grounds of a cathedral, or your own back yard. You can choose somewhere very familiar to you or somewhere completely new or anything in between. The only important things are that you be outside in the open air, that you deliberately choose the place or the route, that you be alone, and that you choose to connect.
What does that mean? Connecting? How, and with what?
How is by listening first, and then by looking.
With what is with everything that is, everything you can hear being around you.
Tune into the sounds. Tune into your reactions to the sounds. Go deeper. What do the sounds tell you about what is happening? Let your imagination make up what it doesn’t know, but also think about what you do know.
If you hear a truck rumbling along the road, you know that it has a driver, who has a life not so very different from yours in many ways, and in many ways utterly different. You don’t know if they are male or female, married or single, have children or not, how educated they might be or not. You don’t know if they are book-readers or film-watchers or football-fans or writers or swimmers or keepers of tropical fish or marathon runners or hunters. You do know that they are human, and therefore they have their joys and their struggles. That much you have in common.
Connect with the pleasant sounds: bird-song, maybe, a river tumbling, a sea meeting the shore, the wind in the trees – or music from windows or buskers or a passing car. Again, allow your mind to follow whatever pathways open up. How are you similar, how are you different? I wrote a poem last week in which a yellow horned poppy told me about how similar we are, the things we have in common.
Don’t differentiate between human sounds, machine sounds, animal sounds, planet sounds…notice them all, reach into them all, let them reach back to you. If they irritate you or make you angry, simply notice that and recognise whether or not the reason for the noise has bearing on your life – in which case, maybe soften the anger – that pneumatic drill really is intrusive, but maybe you’d like that road to be mended. Those war planes flying overhead are frightening, but they connect us to wars being fought (whether we agree with them or not) and through that medium with the people who are suffering as a result. Or maybe we could think abut the pilots and the girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, children, or parents who fear every time they take to the sky. See every sound as a thread that leads you to a human being, or to an animal, or to the planet itself.
Connection is all about threads. And we are all woven into an amazing tapestry...just noticing how that is so has the potential to make us feel part of something huge, and therefore much less alone.
