LONELINESS! WHAT CAN AND SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT!

(These thoughts are added to three times each week)

Mother Theresa didn’t title the following thoughts “How to Cut Down on Loneliness,” but if you do what she suggests, it can do just that.

Accept the fact that people are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind and loving, some people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind and loving anyway.
The good you do today, people may forget tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Loneliness today is an epidemic. There are exceptions to the rule but too often these days some people know their neighbor’s dog better than they know their neighbor.

Just about everyone knows the parable of the good Samaritan, but more important than the healing of this wounded traveler’s bumps, bruises and breaks was the healing of his pain of loneliness – all the people who simply passed on by without taking the time to care. And then, finally, someone did not pass him by. And his smile was a mile wide and as stratospheric high as the happiness in his heart.

Do you remember the tragic story of the death of Kitty Genovese more than two decades ago in New York? Loneliness must have been a living hell for her as time and time again her neighbors watched, without helping, as her killer’s knife ripped and tore at her body. The wounds from which she finally bled to death were an agony, but the pain of loneliness must have been almost as great.

I remember one particular time when loneliness was my constant companion. I had committed myself to a 55-day speaking tour but because my mother had become seriously ill, my wife Tucky had to remain in Miami to take care of her. Though my heartstrings vibrated to a song of despair, my wife’s absence was made more bearable by those, in the places where I spoke, who surrounded me with their special concern. And I thought how wonderful a world it could truly be if daily everyone did more than just brush egos against egos.

A complaint I have heard in hundreds of counseling sessions is a wife or husband lamenting, “I start to tell the story of my day and am interrupted before I’m even half way through.”

And troubled children voicing the same discontent. “I began to tell Mom and Dad about what’s happened at school, and they’re so busy telling me to sit up straight or get my elbows off the table or go study or….they never hear.”

It is very lonely to feel that no one really cares what we have done or had done to us.

But when we pause to listen, to give a helping hand to give sometimes no more than a smile…loneliness, at least momentarily, takes a back seat and the world of all of us is the better for it.