Deep Loneliness and the Raft of Self

Any­one who has tak­en the risk to live their per­son­al mean­ings is like­ly to come up against a dif­fi­cult fact: that to live in this cho­sen (and des­tined) way may also mean deep lone­li­ness. It is not always so, of course, but unless you are will­ing to ful­ly sur­ren­der to where your des­tiny might lead you, includ­ing some very emp­ty spaces, it is not like­ly that you will achieve the goal of find­ing your own truest heart and your right­ful place. Per­haps this is why many nev­er rise to their actu­al potentials. 

It is dif­fi­cult for any of us to sin­cere­ly face lone­li­ness. It is an incred­i­ble Bud­dha, and a ruth­less one. There are any num­ber of Zen koans that can push us to the edge of know­ing, chal­leng­ing us to give up our ratio­nal think­ing in favor of pure intu­ition. Lone­li­ness is our emo­tion­al koan, an enig­ma need­ing no words at all, but point­ing nev­er­the­less to the very thing we seek. It forces us to retreat into our­selves to dis­cern the great­est mean­ing, if we can, and give up every pre­tense. For lone­li­ness in its essence is sep­a­ra­tion from the Source. If you feel that sep­a­ra­tion then you know both the Source itself and the gap, the place you stand now and the riv­er that must be crossed.

They say, of course, that true lead­ers know lone­li­ness, and this leads to an irony in human soci­ety: we must be doing some­thing wrong if those in such an impor­tant role as cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ty are them­selves lonely. 

I think of a good friend who works tire­less­ly in the name of cre­at­ing mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions in work­places. She has encoun­tered innu­mer­able enter­pris­es, and a huge range of peo­ple. She is very suc­cess­ful finan­cial­ly. She is incred­i­bly well regard­ed for her work and well put togeth­er emo­tion­al­ly. And yet, for all her lead­er­ship to cre­ate com­mu­ni­ty through her work, she goes home alone. What is this? And how many of us are there?

I do not believe lone­li­ness of itself is the prob­lem. Lone­li­ness is only the symp­tom. There are plen­ty of psy­cho­log­i­cal writ­ings on lone­li­ness. Yet when we try to put these con­cepts into the con­text of lead­er­ship, they are inad­e­quate. Lone­li­ness for lead­ers is the exis­ten­tial con­di­tion of being the one who ini­ti­ates, who brings some­thing new — whether that “some­thing new” is an aware­ness, an idea or sim­ply a will­ing­ness to risk — the one who brings that new qual­i­ty to a sit­u­a­tion where main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo will no longer pro­vide any val­ue to the com­mu­ni­ty. And lone­li­ness is also the result of all the pro­jec­tions onto the leader(s) from a com­mu­ni­ty, the resid­ual stuff of unful­filled adult­hood, that has to do with the deci­sions that get made, espe­cial­ly the unpop­u­lar ones.

This is why I wrote “The Raft of Self,” a book of med­i­ta­tions and pho­tographs. I wrote it for all of us who have had to come up against the fact of our alone­ness — in our expe­ri­ences, per­spec­tives, and desire to be true to our­selves. Alone­ness, of course, is dif­fer­ent from lone­li­ness. Maybe there is a tran­si­tion from the one to the other? 

Lone­li­ness is a very dif­fi­cult mas­ter. For any who wish to down­load the pdf ver­sion of this short book, here it is. If you are dis­play­ing the book in Adobe Read­er, set the Page Dis­play as “Two-up” and also “Show cov­er page dur­ing two-up.” You should end up with even num­bered pages on the left and odd num­bered ones on the right. Feel free to dis­trib­ute the book to oth­ers, but please don’t use it for any com­mer­cial pur­pos­es, and please give attri­bu­tion for excerpts, includ­ing photos.

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