Loneliness and Aloneness are different.
Loneliness is an emptiness and the desire to fill this space with another person in the hope that the emptiness will be filled and removed. Loneliness is to be unhappy alone; and leads to misery together. Loneliness leads to a possessive relationship that is not love. It may begin with the chemistry in the brain we often call love, but it will be slowly transformed into misery as we adapt to the presence of the chemicals in the brain and it becomes less passionate.
Aloneness is an acceptance of myself.
A relationship is a mirror. It reflects. If I am happy and creative and attractive, the relationship can mirror these qualities. If I have nothing to show, the mirror will reflect nothing.
Learning to be happy Alone
There are 2 emotional orientations:
- Internal and
- External.
Internal emotional orientation is about the enjoyment of my own personal progress in understanding, improving, learning from the action. If i love golf because I enjoy my level of mastery and am absorbed in improving my own short game then this would be internal emotional orientation.
External orientation is that I judge the success or failure of each action by its impact on my status, on how it compares with my friends, on how my friends view me. If I love golf because my friends envy my ability at golf, this would be a external emotional orientation.
I am sometimes internally oriented (searching for meaning) and sometimes externally oriented (what do “they” think of me? is this useful? will it help someone?)
I switch between the two. I can find that I spend a week where I am working hard on a document that is meaningful to me and in “flow”… and then something happens and I get distracted and spend 2-3 days paying more and more attention to what other people think, how many “likes” on fb, how many retweets. Then I have a crisis moment, reflect and switch back to mode 1.
I guess they are both there because they serve a purpose. The challenge is that great art can only come from mode 1, but a lot of useful learning comes from mode 2. I can learn faster in mode 2, but at a certain point I need to leave behind mode 2 and fully live in mode 1.
Do you switch between the 2? What makes the switch happen? Why does it happen? What do you do to be conscious of your mode?