How big is your world? I think the growing loneliness of people is linked to our digital age.
We have never been more connected, and yet we feel isolated from friends and family.
We want so much. It seems we can have it all, satisfy all our needs and desires. We see fleets of ships, cars, and airplanes, but to us these are just machines, with no humanity behind the mechanisms.
We turn inward toward our own genius and inventiveness and cease to look at the stars. We want to tour every country, devour every delicacy, and know it’s possible. We want to have every relationship, make brief, meaningless connections with thousands when we were made for one.
There was an age when the world was small. The wild dreamers dreamed of leaving their own town or country. They dreamed of making the world better in a small way. They dared greatly. They succeeded or failed zealously, were loved, or honored, or forgotten. They did not fear the grave.
If we are made to love one woman or one man as a wife or husband… how much harder is it if we meet ten thousand? How confusing, how harmful. I can see now why people seek solitude, small towns, a simple life. It is in loving a few with great earnest that we find our happiness, or not at all. In a world of billions, what can one man, even a king do? What good is money if it cannot buy silence, a kind word to a neighbor, a pleasant conversation with an aging relative? What good is charisma if it cannot win our own stubborn hearts? What good is being lovable if we do not give of ourselves?
In the words of blessed Mother Theresa, “if you can’t feed a hundred people then feed just one. And remember if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
So pray my friends. And do not be content with being connected. Be authentic. Be real. Disconnect and take hold of the soul sitting nearest to you, and say to him or her, I love you.
Brian Toups Writes 