Who are we when we're alone?
Various historical thinkers on community, anxiety, and loneliness
Over the last year, I’ve been exploring the notion of non-anxious presence with several people and reading what various thinkers throughout human history have to say about related ideas.
One input came from a recent conversation with my friend Wes.
He shared he finds his foundation, his sense of presence, in surrounding himself with genuine people, people who are willing to be honest with themselves in a pursuit of meaning.
This reminded me of the late priest and writer Henri Nouwen, who suggested that our community is what holds us, likened to a rope tethered around our waist, keeping us connected to a safe space no matter where we go, so that we can meet high-pressure situations with a differentiated presence. Our community might serve to tug the rope whenever needed.
As we continued to talk, Wes then shared about a recent split in his friend group. People he counted as dear decided to move on for their own reasons.
Even a genuine community is temporary.
What if becoming a non-anxious presence has something to do with not overly attaching or fixating one’s identity to relationships with people?
People come and go, which begs the question, how will we release them?
And who will we be after we release them?
Questions like these kept the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche up at night.
After five of his six siblings passed away before he turned twenty-five, Kierkegaard was riddled with a crippling anxiety. “Angst,” he called it. Not an anxiety disorder, but an underpinning condition which he believed plagued all of humanity.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” he wrote.
However, Kierkegaard sought to make sense of and use anxiety. He did not believe it was a bad thing, rather a necessary part of life.
He suggested that our response to anxiety might make the difference between a life of freedom and a life of despair.
To respond well, Kierkegaard proposed a human must pursue what he called “passion.”
When Nietzsche was but a boy, his father was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease and died at the young age of thirty-five. The following year, Nietzsche’s brother also died.
Nietzsche then endured a mostly serious and lonely childhood.
As he lived out his days often receiving medical treatment, he found a kind of freedom in thinking and writing. In time, he suggested that what humans really needed was to pursue a growth cycle of self-dissatisfaction, self-improvement, and self-re-discovery.
For Nietzsche, this process transmuted “the suffering of life into something worthwhile and personally redeemable; a sort of alchemy of the spirit.”
More recently, the pallative nurse and Australian writer Bronnie Ware reflected upon her experiences consoling those on their deathbeds, and wrote, “Loneliness isn’t a lack of people. It is a lack of understanding and acceptance.”
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in his groundbreaking novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, penned the words, “There are two possibilities: Either we are all alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Here is a third: We are not alone, yet we feel loneliness.
How we learn to hold ourselves will make all the difference.