Once you recognize the feeling of longing, you begin the journey of allowing yourself to reveal the truth to yourself.
Sitting here quietly before anyone is awake, an answer comes back: friendship, companionship, not feeling alone, loving and being loved.
It still astonishes me that my family wants to be with me. I still, today, do not believe this is totally true. Wife of 25+ years. Grown children. They’ve had plenty of time to judge me and they still say and behave as if they love me.
Why do I not accept this? Why do I still feel empty and alone? Why do I doubt what I see and experience?
This is something that doesn’t yield to Industrious Personal Development, I fear. And buckling down to a deliberate course of self-improvement is the only tool I have in my toolbox.
Study and hard work has been my lifelong solution to everything. It won’t work here.
Ah well. If this is the paradox I must live with, so be it.
In the meantime I’m going to pull out the only tool I carry, and try to live the words of the St. Francis Prayer. Seek to understand rather than be understood. Seek to comfort rather than be comforted. Etc.
I don’t know what else to do. Except maybe just sit with the yearning.