You are busy.
Everyone around you is busy.
Well, may be not everyone.
In fact, there are a lot of people out there who were very busy and they are not busy anymore. When they were busy, they didn’t have time for anyone. When they finally got out of their busyness, there is nobody for them.
Loneliness is probably the biggest unacknowledged problem today. Lonely people have a hard time accepting their situation. It is a matter of self-esteem. If you admit that you are lonely, it is almost admitting that you are screwed up. That is hard.
If you observe loneliness, it does not happen all of a sudden. It is the result of all the people decisions you made over the long term.
Two things to note:
2. The corollary to that simple rule is that even when you care enough for enough number of people over the years, there may not be enough people to care for you when you need them.
That said, we both know that the first choice is always better than the second choice.
Now, whatever be the reason you are lonely, you can’t fix it easily. You can’t go back in history to fix all your people decisions. So in this case, definitely, prevention is always better than cure.
With that in the background, I want to make my point:
Sharing about one’s loneliness is the ultimate demonstration of vulnerability. Nobody wants to be vulnerable. But if you get the right cues, you can figure out if someone is “lonely” or not.
How about reaching out and helping those who are lonely before their loneliness turns into something worse – depression or sickness. I was told that America consumes 50% of the world’s anti-depressant drugs. Scary, yes but we can all join hands and fix the problem a bit.
If you are truly there for someone and make them feel that they are not lonely, you give them a new life. You give them new hope. You give them a gift that only another person can give.