Dear Dr. Johnson:
Thank you for your reply. I can sense your lonliness but I must tell you that I was hoping to find someone closer to my age. You sound like a very nice person and I truly hope that you find someone in your quest to overcome your lonliness.
I am attaching below something I just read and hope you enjoy it.
Age is the elegy of elegies. It has greater impact than death in many ways. In death you are remembered. In age, you are far more likely to feel forgotten, sequestered even from the very act of living.
There is a loneliness that seeps in as we age. It is the loneliness that distances ourselves from where we’ve come from and to where we’re going. We begin to be less and less here and more and more…where? It is the preoccupation with the where-ness that begins to take over.
On the one hand, we’re lonely, even in a crowd; because there are so few, if any, we can talk to about this new moment in our lives. And on the other hand, it does not feel real, even to us. Age, we know, is nothing but a number. Except that is isn’t. Things begin to happen to us that make the number real. We begin to be aware that life is slipping between our fingers, like the oil of fine olives, smoothly and steadily, smoothly and regularly, smoothly but inevitably.
That’s when we get lonely, not because we are being isolated or ignored, but precisely because we are now in the fullness of life. Our own. We are not living the life of the masses anymore. And our life, we have come to understand, is very different from theirs.
We miss the sense of importance that comes with the bustle of middle age. At least we miss it until we become conscious of the new importance that comes with simply being who we are, rather than simply what we did. Until that time arrives, there is the feeling that we are all talking to one another under water: we do not know what they are talking about anymore. And that is very frightening. And the people around us, the people we’ve known for a long time, do not understand us either.
We miss the intellectual stimulation, sense of achievement, of being needed, that came with the daily problems. We miss having a place to fill.
Then we discover that if we’re lonely, it may be because we have not looked around to see who needs us. A person who is needed – really needed, is never lonely, never isolated, never without purpose in life. All we need to do is to go out and do something. The world is waiting for us with open arms.
A burden of these years is that we will hole up somewhere and mourn our age, our change in life, our losses.
A blessing of these years is that we will make ourselves available to the world that is waiting for us, even now, even here.
Good luck to you in your quest!
