They say it takes a village to raise a child…
Perhaps it takes a village to live a life.
Sometimes I sit here, in the middle of my home and in the middle of my life, and I feel such an acute sense of loneliness that I feel like it is going to swallow me up, consume me, leave me beaten and breathless.
I remember my first week of college. I lived on the second floor of my high rise dorm in Milwaukee, and we didn’t have air conditioning, so my window was open wide to the hot late August heat outside. It was getting to be late at night, and some event that I hadn’t known about had just ended. Swarms of people headed back to the dorm, and there were hundreds congregating right outside my window.
As I said, it was my first week there, and I didn’t really know anybody, but I laid in bed, staring out the window, watching all of these people talking, laughing, and getting to know each other, and more than anything I wanted to be out there with them. I wanted to join in the conversations. I wanted to make friends.
And yet I stayed in bed, not knowing how to walk past that wall that separated us because as I think we’ve all experienced, the emotional walls were much harder to break through than the physical ones.
And oftentimes, I find myself back in that same situation, feeling like I’m on the outside looking in. People are all around me. Laughing, joking. We are all there. Being seen. We’re all here in this world connected by computer screens, sharing snapshots of our lives, peering into the windows of others. But how often, anywhere in life, are we actually known?
We smile in the daylight and plead to the darkness, praying that something will connect us with others, that we will find a hand reaching out to ours, breaking the isolation. All too often, however, it feels like we are screaming into the wind.