04.08.2026
Being on your own
I live on my own. My wife died many years ago, my children are living their own lives, my brothers are busy with theirs, and the community where I spent forty years pushed me aside a long time back.
I don’t say it as a complaint. I say it because it’s the similar situation a lot of people who read me are in, and almost nobody names it.
There’s a big difference between being on your own and feeling alone, and most advice goes after the first one. Sign up for something. Call someone. Get out more.
Sometimes it works. Other times you come home at eleven lonelier than when you went out, and tired on top of it.
What has worked for me isn’t company. It’s having something to do that doesn’t depend on anybody and that matters more than I do. A text to check. An archive to save. A card to write at seven in the morning.
That doesn’t cure being alone. It turns it into something else: useful silence.
And monks know a fair amount about that, because eight years in a temple are eight years of being very accompanied and very alone at the same time.