The heart is a lonely hunter...

dawn in Romblon

When I think of loneliness, the novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is the first thing that comes to mind.

Is it OK to talk about loneliness nowadays? Probably not. There’s always shame and disgrace attached to admitting loneliness. Maybe this is the reason why I sometimes wrap it in fancy names like depression (sounds like a medical condition), blues (a personal idiosyncrasy), PMS (can’t help it). I have friends and family and I can find the company I want if I really want it…but it’s the type of company that adds to my feelings of isolation. For a couple of weeks now, I can never quite seem to shake this state of discontented estrangement. I'm having a hard time getting up in the morning--all I want to do is sleep.

My co-worker suggested that I go out of town with friends, that I need a break. I was thinking of going to Baguio last Friday for the Panagbenga festival, but I was too lazy to even pack! I like the idea of going out of town---anywhere---but I don’t like company. Right now, I want to just drive alone without a definite destination. The scheduled trip to Cebu next week is probably a good thing.

I was out with friends almost every night last week…watched a movie, drinks and blabber---but I felt incredibly lonely in the middle of it all. I hugged Fritz last night and was overcome by that same emptiness.

Maybe it's the literature I've been reading---I’ve finished Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul” and have started on “The Kite Runner” by an Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. I guess the melancholy (or huzun) of “Istanbul” didn’t leave me.

Huzun is a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress.

While some of us spend a lifetime trying to escape loneliness with shoe shopping, binge eating, alcohol, one-night stands…I believe that the only real way through it is by forming true connections with people. But as I grow older, I sometimes feel that I seem to have lost the connection with people, that I indulge myself in solitude. Have I become indifferent? Have I opted to emails, internet chats, blogging, and text messages in order not to get my hands dirty in the humus of humanity? Are these technologies little arrows targeting at the heart of loneliness, or they’re the contributing factors?

I don't know if my loneliness is a symptom of not being “present” in my life. Do I live in the past or the future? Am I denying myself this moment? I ask myself lots of difficult questions when I’m in this mood, and I don’t have the answers. But I learned from experience that loneliness is part of the puzzle of existence, a passing phase, a flatulence of the soul—so I know, I’ll snap out of it. It’s just a question of when.