When You Find Yourself Totally Alone

When You Find Yourself Totally Alone


Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying

Some day you may find yourself totally alone. At least you will feel that way.

Virtually no one wants to find themselves alone in the world. But it happens. It happens to almost every one of us at some time or another in our lives. In our modern world where more people are alive than at any other time in human history, more of us feel totally alone. What's worse, no one is prepared for it. We may be surrounded by people, even family, yet feel alone. As if you are a shadow passing by other living creatures who don't know you are there.

You may not know anyone who feels totally alone today. That is a critical point. People who feel alone disappear into the crowd. You know someone, but you don't know how deeply confused and alone they feel. We may work with them or sit beside them at worship or nod as we pass them when leaving home or in the market, but not realize how alone they feel. For a person who feels totally alone, the world is a very different place from the one most of us live in. Same world, feels alien.

When it happens that we find ourselves alone in the world, most of us reluctantly ask ourselves if we are responsible for our own aloneness. Most of us convince ourselves that others were to blame. Or just one other. Always someone else, for some of us. Those who blame themselves for their total aloneness may be the worst off because they face their accuser every day in the mirror. They don't even want to look.

I'm not going to tell you that your aloneness (or anyone else's) was your own fault. Because it wasn't. Nor am I prepared to let you put the blame on someone else. Because they likely weren't at fault either. And because they no longer matter to you.

When you are alone in the world, the people of your past matter little. Even family members and loved ones seem unimportant. That's alienation, or some call it dissociation.

What matters to a person who feels alone is the people of their future. If it's you, you need a new future, not a repeat of your past. That means you need to learn how to create a new and healthy future. Often that means having to let go of the past, of the people, though not the memories. Much as you wish it to be different, you can't get people you know or knew to care more than they do. They knew the old you, got used to the old you, and you need to create a new you.

Most of us have wondered what it would be like to start our lives over again, especially our adults lives. And especially knowing what we have already learned. Now is the time. This is the big chance. Make a new set of friends, even relatives (by marriage or other association), the way you would like to have friends. The kind of friends you would like to have. The kind of friend who will appreciate you as a true friend. Easier said than done? I'll show you how.

Your future will be entirely your responsibility because you will create it. If you fall back on ways that caused you to be alone in the first place, you will be responsible for that and you will feel worse because you failed yourself and you know it. You need to think out what characteristics you would want of a new friend before you go looking for one.

The first rule about making new friends when you feel alone is that the people who are easiest to befriend are the wrong kinds of friends to have. For example, spend money on them or actively engage in sex with them and they may quickly learn to like you. However, they will also vanish or betray you as quickly as they came, leaving you alone again. False friends. Temporary pals. Business friends that disappear as soon as they have nothing more to gain from associating with you.

False friends always want something from you or they drop you. Real friends--the ones you want to have--need something from you, but it's not much. They want you to care about them. In exchange, they will care about you. To make a real friend you have to care about someone beyond yourself. The life of that friend must be more important than what you care about the cashier in the supermarket or the meter reader who checks your power consumption for the utility.

People with whom you exchange pleasantries, a few drinks, a few laughs are not necessarily real friends. To them you are their means of passing some time in a pleasant way. Make the distinction. Pals and friends are not the same thing. Nor should you, when you make a real friend, forget how to treat them and to think of them differently.

The second rule about making new friends is to analyze what kind of people you had previously as friends. You obviously don't want to make more like them or they would still be your friends. Something was wrong in those previous relationships. Did you buy them with investments of money or energy or time, for example? Friends are made by investing time and energy in them or on their behalf, but if they have nothing to give back you will not have anything on which to cement a friendship.

The hardest lesson many of us have to learn about making friends and cementing relationships is that most people aren't worth trying to make into friends. For you. They may be suitable friends for others, but something doesn't click with you and you likely won't ever be able to make it happen. To be a friend to you, a person must invest emotional energy in you. That will often happen only after you have made the same investment in them. But, like sticking coins in a slot machine, not everyone you invest emotional energy in will become a true friend.

There are many different kinds of friendships, but the worthwhile ones begin and continue with your doing something of value to or for the other person. They will do things for you too, if they want to, if they know how and if they want to be real friends. Making a new friend means putting yourself out there to do something for someone else, with no promise of return. You may do something for many different people before you find one or two with promise for a friendship. Everyone will take from you if you offer, only a friend or potential friend will give back something in return.

We're a social species. When we find ourselves totally alone--or feeling alone, no matter how many others are around us--because no one cares, we feel alienated from the rest of the world. Aloneness is a feeling more than a physical reality. The feeling is real. Many times when someone feels totally alone it's because they have realized that no one cares about them the way they would like someone to care. In a highly social world, no one seeks them out for the pleasure of their company.

Despite our need for social experiences and social relationships, we also need some time to ourselves. Without that time to ourselves, time when we can do what we want and enjoy our own company, we can't be independent people. We can only be part of a collective of two or more people if we can't do things on our own and enjoy both the doing together and the aloneness. People who depend on other close friends or spouses so much they spend all their time together suffer most when the other is taken away, such as by death.

Death is real. We need to consider death. The death of a loved one or friend as well as our own. To survive the death of a close friend or mate, we need to have some measure of independence we can resort to after a tragedy. As we find ourselves alone, we need to have an independent life we can expand rather than no life other than with the one who departed. What happens to the "two who became one" when one dies? We need both the social part of relationships as well as knowledge that we can survive on our own. If we can survive our aloneness, we can build a new "together" with someone else.

Maybe the biggest question you would have about making a new friend or finding a new mate or spouse is whether or not you can trust that person. Ask yourself first, can you be trusted? How totally trustworthy are you? You can't and shouldn't expect a friend or mate to be more trustworthy than you. In one sense, you need to exude trustworthiness to make a friend because a potential new friend will look for that.

You will also need to need to feel you are contributing about 85 percent to the relationship in comparison to the other person's 15 percent. Can you feel comfortable with that? In most relationships that work well, especially with wives and husbands, each feels they contribute about 85 percent to the relationship and can be satisfied with that. It's not true though because neither one realizes how much the other contributes to the relationship. We only know fully what we contribute. Don't be shocked if you seem to be giving more to a good friend than you receive. That's human nature, the way it works.

Even in supposedly monogamous relationships, one of the partners or both will have sex with another person, covertly of course. In the United States a study has shown the 85 percent of married men and 65 percent of married women have at least one sexual experience outside the marriage. If you want a friend or spouse to forgive your mistakes, you must be prepared to forgive theirs. If you can, your relationship has a better chance of surviving than most. Remember, everyone makes mistakes of some kind. Everyone. Real friends forgive.

There will be mistakes. There will be errors. There will be times of neglect, of forgetfulness and of miscalculation of the importance of feelings by both parties. Forgiveness gets you past these problems. Holding a grudge, not forgiving, causes you more pain than it does the other person. It may not be fair, but it's life.

In a world where we each of us expects to have to look out for our own best interests, it's extremely hard to find someone worth investing your time and energy on to create a relationship. Finding one that works is worth the pain and struggle. Finding that special someone as a friend or mate or spouse may require a lot of pain and suffering along the way. It means failures and non-starters. It means being able to recognize a failed or unworthy relationship before you invest to much in it.

Failure to build a new relationship means you can try again. Quitting will ensure you remain alone.

When so many marriages fail within five years, for example, do you not wonder whether the couple jumped into something one or both were not ready for or whether they simply chose the wrong person? Was finding someone, anyone, more important than finding the right one? Did they share the same values? Did they want the same things from a marriage? Was each prepared to give to the other what the other needed? Or did they just want to be married, hoping that it would work out over time, as arranged marriages are supposed to do? Did they just want from a marriage what they wanted and judge the relationship on whether they got it or how completely they got it?

No matter what kind of relationship you want to begin, you must first decide what kind of person would satisfy your need. Not everyone will fit your need and you must understand that before you begin anything. Most people aren't worth your time and emotional investment. The ones who are don't wear signs advertising the fact on their chests.

Another factor to consider is that someone who is looking for a new friend or mate will be more interested in what you have to offer them than in what they can offer you. If you mount a public profile on a web site, for example, you are advertising. You will advertise what the other wants and you can satisfy, not what you are looking for. Tell what kind of person you are, what you enjoy, what you value. If you tell mostly what you are looking for you open yourself to the possibility of being targeted by someone who believes he or she can take advantage of that by pretending to offer just that.

Talking about yourself only works so far. In advertising, the advertiser needs to appear to be more interested in the needs of the buyer than his or her own needs. Be an asker and a listener more than a teller. The world is full of people who want to tell you about themselves but who don't want to hear about you because they don't care about you. To get their attention to start something, you need to listen first. And ask about them.

Whether you look for a new friend or a new mate, look where you expect to find such a person. Many think of joining a religious group or service club, but don't think of volunteering. When you volunteer to help a charity, for example, you meet others who are also offering themselves to help others. If finding someone who will give of themselves to help others is something you are looking for--that's a critical component of every long term relationship--then volunteering costs very little and offers many possible benefits, for everyone. Volunteering is a much overlooked place to find new friends.

To find a "best" anything is a struggle. But life is a struggle. That's the way it works. Anything that comes easy is rarely worth more than was invested to get it. Keep looking. Unlike the elusive pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, finding a friend or soulmate you can treasure will happen if you do what is needed to find the right person. Don't take you time at it, friends don't usually come knocking on your door. Get doing it.

But remember, you must be the right person for the other as much as he or she must be right for you. The "lost love" was not just a missed opportunity. It was more likely a bad fit. Look for a better fit. It will happen if you work at it.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read book about how to avoid personal and community problems before they become problems that are impossible to solve.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

The Secret Law of Abundance

The secret of the law of abundance is this: In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give.
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)

I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.

However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."

This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.

Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.

Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.

Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.

The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.

A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.

That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief.

Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.

Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.

No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.

They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.

The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.

The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.

No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.

Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.

For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.

Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.

Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.

Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.

Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.

Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.

But they may appreciate a good tickle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Making Life Worth Living

The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

"If I were any better, I'd have to be twins." I suspect my friend who says that regularly may not have "graduated" from grade school. He has never had the luxury of unassigned cash to do with as he liked because he has raised two families of children, much of it on his own as his wives left him. To him, buying a good cup of coffee from a coffee shop is a luxury because he doesn't have to make his own.

Yet that is the reply he usually gives when someone asks him "How's it goin'?"
He won't burden you with his troubles because he knows you have your own. As he can't likely help you with your problems and most people don't care enough to help him with his, he doesn't talk about them.

He talks to God. God, he claims, has been good to him. Though he prays daily--often for others, including me and my wife-- when he is in a particularly big fix he knows he can't handle, he prays extra hard for help. Without fail, something happens and each situation gets resolved. Always.

Now mostly retired (his income is secure), he volunteers at a drop-in centre for teens in the village where he lives. As odd and assorted kids stop by his apartment unexpectedly and consider his home their second and him more of a father than their own, "The Hub" centre is a good fit. He may even take over as its director since he lives closest of the volunteers and the teens (the youngest is 11, but was already on his way to becoming a gangster) act mature and trustworthy when he's around.

His reward is seeing kids turn their lives around. He feels good about it.

Another friend calls several times each week to tell me his problems. He always has more than his share of problems because he repairs computers, usually for big companies whose employees abuse their equipment and fail to protect them with antivirus and antispyware programs regularly. Getting warranty claims resolved positively is almost impossible, people always want their computers back yesterday and some don't want to pay him for months (if ever).

I listen. When he calls to rant, I listen. Sometimes I put my work on hold for an hour or more, but I listen. By the time we hang up, his previously big problems seem nothing more than speed bumps on the highway of life.

Life for this second friend is rocky, filled with ups and downs. The downs don't last long because he feels pretty good when we get off the phone. When it's too early to call me, he exercises, roughly the way an Olympic athlete would exercise, to that level of intensity. Though he will count 65 birthdays as of this year, his brain kicks out the dopamine to make him feel good when he works to his physical limit.

He goes for physical therapy on his hand a couple of times each week and other visits for his bad knee, which has a nasty habit of locking, throwing him headlong onto something that is usually hard. He went through a wooden step in the first place that resulted in his knee being banged up, causing him more pain in a day (he can't sleep longer than four hours) than most people suffer in a year, or ten. Sometimes the locked knee causes him to be thrown down stairs, which is how he wrecked his hand.

But life's pretty good for him.

These two men use their minds to make their lives good, worth living. Wayne Dyer doesn't know them, but if he did he would use them as examples in his speeches and seminars.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to teach children to approach life positively so that they can lead physically and psychologically healthy adult lives. And to be good mothers and fathers themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

If You Are Extreme, You Don't Matter

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
- Susan Sontag, author and critic (1933-2004)
(or, what I see is not what you painted)

This applies as much to writing or any other art as it does to painting or sculpture.

Sometimes it shocks me how a reader can find the least important part of something I have written, misinterpret it in such a way that in seems to mean the opposite of what I intended, then assail me for being such an idiot.

Name-calling aside, it is nearly impossible to write something that someone with malicious intent can't misinterpret and use against the writer. It's like tearing off someone's leg, then beating him to death with it.

When I write something of the length of this article, my overarching objective is to get readers to think about the topic and the overall effect the article has had on them. However, some people can't see big pictures. They can only see small pictures, like watching a movie by viewing only a few frames at a time.

Recent research suggests that the brain changes as we age so that older people are able to see the big picture of some situation, whereas younger people are more inclined to only be able to see individual parts of it. These are generalities, not absolutes. But they are part of human nature. Some people can't ever see big pictures, so things like wars, the United Nations, the AIDS pandemic and global warming mystify them.

If writing can be misinterpreted when every part of it should be laid out and clear, then individual actions and ill-considered words can easily be misinterpreted as well. A close friendship of many years might disappear when one friend does something the other doesn't understand, then misinterprets the motives of the first and makes the split.

What is the overall message of this article? Ignore the extremes of what people do, say or write and examine the vast majority of words and acts that comprise the middle section of their behaviours. If all behaviours were put onto a bell curve, we could look at the high parts in the middle and ignore the extremes at either end that might not be valid or typical anyway.

Each of us exhibits extreme behaviour once in a while. We deserve to be forgiven for it if we have been moderate most of the time.

I will ignore the cranks who hate this piece as well as those who want me to contribute to a sperm bank because of it to save something so special. I'm just an average person trying to get you to think about the mysterious world of human nature.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the mysteries of life a bit easier to understand.
Learn more at http://billallin.com