Replying to LO28674 --
Dear LOners,
We're all alone. This is what i would call solitude. Perhaps we should
have a guide book called "Lonely Planet" to guide us through this world
;-). Or "Alone on the World". And also, there are some famous last words
refering to the feeling of being left alone.
Most of us, i assume i can generalize from one case, will have felt
loneliness, desperation, lost, clueless, empty, tired. Thank you for
sharing these feelings with us. Acknowledging, accepting feelings and
emotions is - in my experience - important, because feelings drive us,
make us into beings. The feelings create our negative as well as positive
emotions, the surfaced feelings. Our trouble start when one doesn't accept
the negative emotions and/or stresses the positive. Altough to realize
this - that this is what may cause our problems - one has to learn. And
this learning involves not accepting - for a time - negative feelings and
emotions. When one hasn't learned to accept one's own emotions, you're
still driven by them.
Being alone generates the feeling of loneliness. Loneliness - the feeling
- may have caused us to organize; perhaps that is why we have this very
feeling. In a family, a group, a team, a department, an organisation, a
tribe, in a nation we do not feel lonely, despaired, lost. Organizing
however doesn't "solve" the problem of aloneness. The bigger the feeling
of loneliness, the larger the group: there seems to be safety in numbers.
A large organization is more successful than a small organisation, in part
because the shared values, the common vision, help us to overcome
loneliness. We can identify with the group. - you may have marked the
enthousiasm in Japan and South-Corea on the results of their football - or
soccer - teams: what does this say about the feeling of loneliness and
despration?
But the larger the group, the more one is reduced to a number, a detail, a
footnote in a telephone directory. In fact, after some time, people feel
more alone then ever in an organisation, a group, a team. The feelings of
loneliness return. Now, we cannot blame the group - as it has been very
successful in reducing the anxieties of loneliness, we have trouble
blaming ourselves - because this would imply that we made the wrong
choices in joining a group, a team, a nation. And the way out is to
project these feelings on others and other groups. Others in an other
(another?) group do not seem to be alone and therefore not lonely.
Gradually our loneliness and despair builds. We might end up hating the
other group(s).
Thinking about this, it occured to me that this seems to fortify our own
group, the team you're in, the people you're with. It - the
dis-acknowledgment of aloneness - stops internal critism, it stops
rational thinking, it ends accepting negative feelings, it increases the
sense of urgency. Perhaps loneliness invokes cycles of success to the
successful that creates large groups and a shifting of the burden to these
groups and a countervailing forces by other groups that work just in the
same way.
When one has learned to live with being alone, feeling lonely, desparate -
and were can you learn this better than in a desert, deserted from others
- metaforically, this desert can be a large, very large group, like a
modern city, corporation or nation - having learned to cope with our
feelings, we still have the dilemma of organizing successfully. The trick
that might do it, i assume, is to organize into organization with personal
developement as its vision, mission and goal. We might be able to persuade
people to trade in feelings of insecurity for learning to have feeling of
insecurity. This new type of organisations should at least contain a
department Human Destinations Management. (Is there an R-word which means
soemthing like goal, destination, developement?)
See, what you noted in the LOnely-list, this dear LO of ours, is that it
is alright to feel lonely and despaired. LOnely and the spared. A small
step towards the destination of humankind.
You're welcome,
Jan Lelie
John Dicus wrote:
> I've often wondered how many of you have felt loneliness or despair. Or
> are feeling it. Wondering because I have. Because I do now.
>
> snip
> But I wait to see what I'm learning and trust that I'm going to like where
> I find myself. But it is lonely at times. It can make you feel desperate
> -- even if only a little bit. This LO community helps more than you might
> know. So I've wondered -- do any of you ever have such feelings from time
> to time?
>
> Thanks for listening. Below is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters
> To A Young Poet." It strengthens me.
--With kind regards - met vriendelijke groeten,
Jan Lelie
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