To Meet The Emptiness Within Us

How do we confront the ferocious “wolf” of loneliness within us?

There have been times when we have experienced the strange feeling of routine survival. We get used to meeting friends, co-workers and family. We talk about our lives as if we were someone who could glide across the water without drowning and say things like, “Sure, it was bad, but it’s okay, I’ve already gotten over it” or “I could not achieve what I did. wanted to, but I will still manage. ”

On the outside, we look like little soldiers hiding the weight of our remorse and grief, and we continue to submissively march forward while saying, “It’s just the way it is.”

We share supportive words and have that mutual understanding with tactical silence. But in the background, in the deepest parts of ourselves, lives an invisible enemy who lives on emptiness, pain and loss.

But what do we mean when we talk about loss? We are not just referring to the physical loss of a loved one. There are actually different types of losses that come with different types of emptiness. Some of these losses refer to frustration, disappointment and all kinds of fear, failure and the bottomless abyss we call “the existential emptiness”.

So what is the most effective method of confronting these different levels of personal loss? How do we overcome these internal wolves that recklessly devour us a little at a time? Let’s take a look at some of these methods:

Accept the loss and understand the emptiness

As the Polish sociologist Zygmund Bauman often explained, many of us live in a kind of “floating society” where immediate enjoyment and making money are highly valued. Nothing seems to hold, not even personal relationships.

It is as if our society only sees things from the bright side, but as soon as something difficult happens or requires a deeper level of implication , the “human fabric” weakens and falls apart. For example, imagine a friend or family member who has been diagnosed with depression. We offer a pat on the back with the comforting words “it will pass” along with a reminder that they should take their medicine.

Pain surprises us. We do not understand it, so we run away from it. But what if we were put face to face with this friend or family member and asked to tell us about the pain they are experiencing or the emptiness within them? Or if we let them drop their words and tears in front of us?

To survive in this complex world, we must confront our enemies face to face, we must know how to understand and accept them. This is how we really grow as human beings because sorrow and pain are not a pile of waste in the corner of our soul or in the darkness of our mind.

All existential emptiness has a form, and we must know how to understand this in order to stop escaping from this internal wolf and travel more safely by knowing what we really need.

Steps to confront our personal emptiness

It is worth bearing in mind that almost all of us tend to believe that life will be exactly as we want it or “almost” as we intended. This is not bad, of course, but we must be thoughtful and accept the possibility that we will not get everything we want.

Does this mean, however, that we are undoubtedly doomed to be unhappy? True happiness does not really lie in achieving everything we want, but in learning to be happy with everything we have achieved, and also with what we have lost.

Surprised? Hopefully not! But it is best that we understand these dimensions; these steps to confront all our personal losses:

1. When you discover that life has given you things you did not expect, do not give up. Instead, take the first step toward accepting your place in every dimension, including your suffering and your pain. If you need to cry, cry ; If you need to be upset, allow yourself to be upset.
2. The second step: never force things to be exactly the way you want them to be. Doing this only makes the problems more chronic. If your partner says he or she does not love you, accept this and do not become obsessed with it. If you did not get the promotion at work you wanted, do not complain about this perceived failure; there may be another way to get what you want.
3. Accept what is happening, understand what it is and try to be grateful for what you have been able to learn, even if you do not understand what it is. Maybe the pain you are experiencing now will help you not make the same mistake in the future. It may even be that existential emptiness forces you to search in new areas of your life, which can really make you happy. Why not try?
4. Move forward, forgive, turn the page, release the burden and integrate everything you have learned in life. After all, there is no better way to enrich life than to fill emptiness with knowledge.

Photos by Colin Blogue.