by tashmcgill | Feb 13, 2016 | Friendship, Love & Marriage, Mind
One morning last year, I woke from a dream and my head was full of thought; hanging like a wave waiting to crest for some time. The kind of billowy thoughts that are undefined; really more of a feeling. It was heavy and I searched to define it until I remembered the word; melancholy.
On this particular morning, I struggled to find reason for my melancholy. I was in the middle of an adventure overseas, I was surrounded with friends and I was drinking whiskey, not gin. I was not unhappy. I was content.
I made coffee and sat at my favourite window in a house I love. The sun was warm on my back and I was without obligation but to embrace the moment. Still my heart would not quicken and I could not lift my soul. And I remembered then; this is the Lonely. There was something within me longing to be heard; but the one to hear was not with me.
So I let it sit, let it dwell with me for the day. Loneliness becomes a more tolerable companion as soon as you acknowledge its presence, I’ve found. I let others assume the reason for my quiet reticence that day and then in the evening, alone in the quietness of my room, I said to the Lonely, ‘Thank you for today and good night.’
The Lonely wished me a clear night of sleeping and gently exited the room. What happened so that when I woke, the Lonely was no longer with me?
What the Lonely Is Trying To Tell Us.
Scientists speculate the human brain contains over 100 billion nerves, communicating complex messages. These nerves are responsible for communicating pain, injury and harm. But the soul, the spirit has no such system – or at least, not one so clearly defined or as understandable as neurons. So the intangible self must find ways of alerting us to when something is wrong with our spirit.
I believe that much of what we feel, sense and experience in life, good and bad – is part of the complex communication between the articulate mind and the intangible, voiceless soul. When change is required, when change is happening, when something good or when something bad is emerging – feelings emerge to guide us down the way.
The challenge is that we confuse these feelings for being a ‘state’ rather than a message. A message is something to hear and respond to; a state is something you have to morph from. The Lonely is trying to tell us something and the lonely won’t go away until it’s been heard.
I was talking with a friend who is recovering from a relationship breakup, the real kind where your whole being is redefined in moments. He spoke with sadness and tenderness about the emerging loneliness in his life and I witnessed many of the ways he tried to change his state of being. And this week, I’ve heard the same from many others as Valentine’s Day approaches.
“If I can just find plans for the weekend, I won’t be lonely.”
“So long as I’m with friends on Valentines Day, I’ll be ok and not think about it.”
“I’m not going to be alone, I am going to find a new relationship.”
Judge a person by their questions, not their answers.
That morning, I woke and encountered melancholy and realised my soul was trying to send me a message.
“Why are you here today, while I am in the company of so many friends? What are you trying to tell me?”
I asked the Lonely what it was saying.
Over the years, the Lonely has visited me before along with Sadness, Frustration, Hopelessness. At other times, Joy, Anticipation, Delight and Contentment have visited me too. But for today, here’s what I’ve learned the Lonely is trying to tell me.
I might be isolated. With people or alone, but either way disconnected. Usually it’s when my thoughts have traveled inward and haven’t been expressed. I have something that ought to be shared with someone but I haven’t shared it.
I might feel invisible or unnoticed in a crowd. This is the plague of the third-wheel, the calamity of the social single. It’s not always, but sometimes you feel you could be lost from the moment without people noticing you were gone.
I am lacking in intimacy. A thousand people to small talk with but no-one to understand the bitter-sweet irony of a moment or a glimpse of something we’ve seen before. An absence of shared memory or history. Often, loneliness exists in the midst of our dearest friendships and relationships because we’ve fallen into the habit of being with someone without being present to that person.
I am not engaged. For human beings, Bored and Lonely are sometimes telling us the same thing. We’re not engaged in the present. With the ones in front of us or with what might be discovered in front of us. We see things as they appear to be. We assume the blue hat is on the hook by the laundry door because it is so frequently there we forget to look for it. We stop noticing the small changes in the pattern of what we see everyday.
I am feeling uncomfortable or in a new environment. I long for something familiar. I long for security.
I feel Other and insecure. I feel alone and unlike anyone else. I am without a sense of home in this moment.
Sometimes I am just longing. Loneliness tells me my body needs touch. I need the embrace of another, the warmth of human skin and to share the breath of life. I need closeness and for my pleasure receptors to be firing. I need to respond and be responded to. That may not mean sex and sometimes it might. Loneliness reminds me that my body, mind and spirit are connected. Two cannot carry the load of three endlessly.
“Why are you here today, while I am in the company of so many friends? What are you trying to tell me?”
In the simplest of forms, loneliness is most often telling us that we need interaction and engagement with other human beings. The burden is that we may not always be able to dictate what kind of interaction we have. But be disciplined and choose which desire to feed.
Which do you feed?
There is a Cherokee story about a boy and his grandfather. The grandfather explains there are two wolves in battle within us; one that is good and represents hope and peace. The other evil and represents anger, sorrow and ego. The boy asks his grandfather which wolf wins and the old man answers, ‘The one you feed’.
When we assess data and information; we have to be careful to not let our assumptions lead to the wrong conclusion. You can find evidence for nearly any hypothesis, depending on the question you ask. So, if you assume that loneliness is a state and you must simply wait until circumstances change so that you are no longer lonely – you are using the wrong data. You have to be careful not to feed your loneliness based on the incorrect data.
But wait about on Valentine’s Day? Or family holidays? Similarly, it is incorrect to assume that a single form of interaction might appease the loneliness or need you have. It is madness to assume that any single relationship can satisfy the needs of a human being. We are complex and multifaceted creatures with maddeningly simple and complex needs. When loneliness enters your life, it’s not because you are single or unhappy in your marriage. It’s because your mind and body is trying to tell you something. When you respond to the message, things will change. Respond to the message first and then deal with the circumstances later.
I will not be any more or less lonely simply because I might one day share my Lonely with another. They will not be able to banish the lonely, but they may share it.
Today, I am single but that’s irrelevant. I am a person who is connected, engaged, present, intimate with a few, friendly with many. I can reach out for a hug when I need it or caress the cheek of a friend. I could take a lover or I could find a mate. But I will not be any more or less lonely simply because I might one day share my Lonely with another. They will not be able to banish the lonely, but they may share it.
You can hear me this Sunday night (February 14, 2016) talking about loneliness on NewstalkZB with Sam Bloore from 6 – 7.30pm.
by tashmcgill | Dec 17, 2014 | Love & Marriage, Relationships
I remember the instance so clearly; I think about it every time I take that same escalator. The escalator is at the airport, so I take it a lot. An acquaintance of mine (who I thought was quite mad at the time) was talking about a mutual male friend, only a couple of years married. She said, “Oh yeah, he’s great. Don’t worry I’m just waiting for the second time around. No point trying to catch a new one, just wait til they are done with the practice round.’
She was talking about what great relationship potential he was and joking about whether or not his relatively recent marriage would last. It was a serious viewpoint on her dating prospects.
Ten years on, I can’t help but wonder if she wasn’t quite as mad as we thought as I’ve watched relationship after relationship fall over, with women ready and waiting in the wings to snap up bachelors ‘recently returned’ to the market.
(Really, I mean any partnership between men and women, or same-sex relationships. However, I think there is a stronger mythology being spread around the difference between men and women.)
Don’t get me wrong, I have little respect for people who insert themselves into the midst of committed relationships and I find society’s tolerance for it to be distasteful. I’m not suggesting that I agree with her. In fact, this is the opposite of that. I’m hoping that women feeling fragmented, dissatisfied or even a little bored, might have a change of heart.
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by tashmcgill | Feb 27, 2013 | Community, Culture & Ideas, Love & Marriage, Poems, Prose & Poetry
I was privileged to attend a beautiful wedding in the weekend, proof sure enough that love still blossoms and people are brave enough to say vows (altogether different to promises) and stand up in front of friends and family to make that commitment to one another. Especially privileged was I, when Paula and Mark asked if I would write a poem to be read at the wedding. Which it turns out, is a beautiful opportunity to put down in words some of what I’ve been reflecting on; the goodness of marriage and the process it is.
More and more, I think that marriage isn’t about finding someone who ticks the boxes, with whom your life fits and feels complete – but choosing someone who you can build a life with. So the image of a garden seems appropriate – we don’t marry because we’ve discovered something beautiful, but because we want to create something beautiful. So this is the poem that I wrote and read for my darling friends. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Oct 19, 2012 | Culture & Ideas, Love & Marriage, Spirituality
This weekend, I’m going to be participating in a conversation about same-sex marriage, the various views on the subject and our response as a Christian faith community, as well as the implications. This is a subject I’ve been waiting on for years – because it’s a magnificent opportunity to redefine marriage at every level.
I first wrote about the definition of marriage as spiritual vs legal before it was even conceivable that the New Zealand government would move towards this legislation in the next 30 years. It was circa 1996 and reeling from the speedy marriage and divorce of some friends, I questioned the legal and civil process by which the dissolution of the marriage took place, in comparison to the associated impact on children, community and relationships.
The same-sex marriage debate raises those thoughts for me again, because I believe in order to have a reasonable discussion, you need to approach the debate with the right questions. So, I’ll quote from a piece I wrote for Christianity Today (bearing in mind that the last paragraph was edited externally) but here’s the quick summary.
- Marriage of any kind, is not the domain of the Church alone. Cultures throughout history have formed marriage rituals for the formalization of societal arrangements by which to raise children and manage property.
- Why should ministers of religion be charged with carrying out civil tasks?
- Can it be possible for the Church to decline to marry those with opposing beliefs around human sexuality, but not refuse those who decline any spiritual belief at all?
- Entering into the state of Marriage (legal) does not presume entry into any spiritual state of marriage, a holy union or otherwise. In it’s essence, the marriage licenses we sign are contracts, made with promises but they are not promises of spiritual intent and union.
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by tashmcgill | Oct 18, 2012 | Culture & Ideas
“…Thus, our humanity became defined by the collection of transactions in which we traded peace, war, love and chaos.
We hoped for triumph, we landed in despair. Then we began again.”
We are in the wild days. Not the wilderness, or a desert or a walkabout gone on too long. No, these are the wild days and the wild nights – it’s we who have become the untamed, the unleashed, the unhindered, the uninhibited. We have loosed our bonds or had them loosened so we have redefined ourselves without boundaries and cast ourselves out into the endless wondering of possibility, the freedoms of being unconstrained.
We have hoped to be brave enough to say “nothing is forbidden” but we are bound in by fear, regardless. We are in the wild days but our hearts are wrestling for constraint.
Wild/wīld/
Adjective: (of an animal or plant) Living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated.
Adverb: In an uncontrolled manner: “the bad guys shot wild”.
Noun: A natural state or uncultivated or uninhabited region.
Synonyms: adjective. savage – mad – feral noun. wilderness – waste
We live in boundaries, in a series of social norms that provide a sort of governance. Beyond these norms, when they are stripped away and discarded, no longer functional or necessary – we fear and risk losing ourselves. We try to replace boundaries, to redefine and reestablish them in hope of finding our secure footing again.
But often the last time we were on the loose without these boundaries was adolescence. In adolescence we treated boundaries with disdain but discovered ourselves by them. Too harsh and we rejected them, too soft and we bowled them over emerging somehow into our first adulthood. So now, we seek out our new rules, our new fences by the same methodology we employed then. Sensationalism, expression, exploration and extremism. We live on high alert, our senses ready and receptive. Still, now is not the time to re-imagine our awakening into adulthood. Once landed there, despite an absence of the boundaries we knew – it’s time to redefine ourselves into adulthood.
Perhaps the final stages of growing up, is redefining yourself into adulthood the second time around. It might be your quarter-life, mid-life crisis, your divorce, a faith crisis, the death of a loved one, an addiction or just boredom that launches your redefining moment. But never have you been more ‘be-coming’ than in that moment of coming home to yourself, in the last rendition.
We are fearful of the wild. The wildness within us, the wildness around us, the wildness of others. Our boundaries, social or otherwise, are our great defensive blockade against the wild. As husbands and wives, we harness each other up to prevent the wild from breaking loose. We employ rules like, “don’t a say a word, if it won’t be nice”, because in the unloosing of our tongue – the wildness might escape.
But I am not afraid of the wild. I long for the wild.
late in the night
i wake, dreaming
saying to myself over and again
‘don’t try to tame the wild one’
then i dream on waking
asking myself which fence to build
which gun to load and thus
hear the lion roar, feel the tiger’s claw
no one ever tamed the wild one.
Don’t build fences, dig deep wells. That is my philosophy of love, loyalty and passion. The concept is self-explanatory – don’t make rules to keep, control or constrain people just create places of deep refreshment that draw people back to the centre.
Here’s why I’m not afraid of the wild within. My well is deep. The tiger in me is well-satisfied. I am at home. Be at home with yourself and the wild within. Don’t build fences, don’t rely on the boundaries. Learn to live from deep within the well. Learn to live in the wild, with the wild, out of the wild.
