Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

"Loneliness is the leprosy of our era." ~ Mother Teresa

I keep a scrap book of quotes from my readings. It's a useful tool for organizing pithy insights from various sources. I don't recall where this one came from, but it stuck me with enough force to record it in my book.

The observation, comparing loneliness to what is now called Hansen's disease, is quite interesting. Leprosy is not like the plague which wiped out a third to half of Europe in the first millennium. Though two to three million people have the disease worldwide, I know of no serious scientist who is concerned about a worldwide epidemic. The media is not stirring up a panic about this unfortunate malady as they have about bird flu which has now killed just over one hundred worldwide.

So the comparison to leprosy has a different meaning from just a communicable disease. One photo of a leper tells why this is. Lepers are shunned. They are ugly. They are outcasts. They're pushed outside the cheerful social exchanges that make up community.

A Google search on loneliness unveils millions of web pages on this theme. How ironic. The world has too many people, yet so many so lonely.

Many books and poems have been written on the theme. Maybe knowing that we are not the only ones who have ever felt this way is helpful. So the lonely share their painfully lovely, lonely self-expressions.

I'm reminded of Billy Joel's observation in Piano Man, "They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."

Whole books on the theme have been written. Perhaps some of the great music we appreciate was squeezed from a lonely heart. For sure you hear it in Tschaikovski. Certainly most creative artists reach into deep spaces of the soul to draw on something there akin to inner isolation. Maybe what makes this experience painful is when we get trapped there, unable to connect to others, and unhappy with our selves. Like the leper, we may feel ugly... unable to see our true beauty; or desperately unaffirmed, unloved and incomplete.

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. We are all, to a lesser or greater extent, travelling a solitary path. As the old Negro spiritual puts it, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows my sorrow..." To the extent we are able to forget ourselves and notice those around us who also have need of being affirmed, loved, valued, appreciated, to that extent we can make this world a better place and escape the prisons we've made for ourselves within our selves.

The following is a poem I wrote describing something of what loneliness has at times meant to me.

Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

So desolate here. So desolate and cold.

You grit your teeth to keep them from chattering.
By the time this is over you'll be lucky to have any teeth at all.

If only you can stop this shivering.

Standing alone, waiting for someone to come along.

So desolate here. Unbelievably cold. It doesn't seem possible.

Is this where it's all going to end?

"What was the meaning of it all? Why am I here?" you ask yourself.

You lean forward into the fierce wind.

Oh for but one spark of human kindness to re-kindle

the cold dark embers of your heart.

You stare out across the virgin snow, fingers numb with cold

under your worn mittens. You've lost all sense of touch.

It hardly matters because there is no one there.

Your arms are so stiff with cold you can no longer reach out.

"Where is everyone? How long, oh Lord?"

You have only the load on your back,

but it is more than you can carry.

And even this you can't take with you when you go,

if it comes to that.
You keep waiting, but no one comes along.

It's a frost cold chill, this loneliness.

It's like hitchhiking across Antarctica.