Too early

So I knew the day was going to be long when I awoke at 3:17 this morning and I mean AWOKE. Not my normal wake up at 3 or 4 and roll over and then start the sequence of snoozing on and off for the next couple of hours. NO this was a sit bolt upright because there is an intruder in your room type waking up (don't panic there was not an intruder in the room ... or was there).

I have slowly been validating my understanding of why this is happening to me. I know the time frame about when my normal 6-7 hour sleep routine began to be 3-4 and then 2 hours of broken sleep. I need some more validation about why this has changed and then I can move into the how to correct this. I know that this trait, though, seem inherent in my family and thus there is a hereditary factor to consider.

Regardless I was wide awake. We all know our bodies and I knew that going back to sleep was an impossibility. I also knew that the prior night I had gone to bed early as I was having some issues with sadness and loneliness. Once again I am seeing a tie in back to the reason why I cannot sleep or at least the sleep patterns have been changed and let me say for right now I am not wanting to truly consider the possibility that a change I made for me in December is the reason for all of this but ...

So I am up and decided to chart out what I have been just mentioning in detail and worked on that for an hour and a half, then the laptop crashed. I work in IT, I support systems and I know better. I had not had auto save turned on and had not intentionally saved it ... thus "poof". Here I was sad, lonely, tired and "poof" just like that everything is gone. Do I throw the laptop out of the second story window or take it to work and throw it from the 20th floor? Neither.

I accept whom I am and the condition that I find myself in. I think for a few. At 4:45 in the morning I have no one to talk to except myself and the Man upstairs. I had wanted to go to church at the 5:30 pm mass on Saturday but had let time slip away. So I got up, showered, grabbed everything for work and waited for church doors to open prior to the 7 am mass.

It was supposed to be. Father Jeremy is a big guy ... just like me. The 1st and 3rd reading empahsized being a witness by "hearing" ... active listening and realization of the impact rather than cursorary listening. That 2nd reading supported but for those of you who know the Catholic liturgical process the 1st and 3rd are joined in meaning while the second is supportive but allows the church to impart a different message if needed. But Fth Jeremy's homily started with, was supported with and ended with an observation of loneliness. I think there was a reason for me to be there at 7 am this morning. All the more so for those of you who know me well know that I am constantly watching, observing if you will and then analyzing what I see.
 
That church was split in a ration of about 65/35 of the ~300 people there with 35 percent of the people there being a couple or unit of some type and the rest of us being solitary individuals. Now out of that 65 percent of single people I was smacked in the face with the realization that about 90 percent of them were single men like me ... ranging from ~40 yrs up to probably in the 80s. What does this mean? Is this some ideological inference? Should alarms be raised? No, this is just how it is. You cannot know if the men were truly single, like me having a girlfriend not there, a wife out of town, a wife who has no desire to be up at the crack of dawn and get the day going. So you can not know how alone some of these men were but here they were in some state of loneliness.

I had posed the question last night about "how can one feel so alone in a sea of people called the human race" and this morning it was really emphasized that it is easy. We are all personal people. We all have a comfort level and some of us seek the social interaction as a craving ... always somewhere doing something self serving for the fact that these people cannot deal with the loneliness that probably descends in a powerful way without being around others. While there are others like me who control that interaction as we have our space and our desires so we control our interaction. In doing so we jeapordize ourselves in the future, for like me when I needed that social interaction with someone yesterday there was no choices left but to be alone as I am not the bar or club adventurer.

So it is OK to be alone at 3:17 in the morning. It is OK to grab a pillow and feel loneliness in a sea of people called the human race because we are not truly alone. We may not have the social interaction, the facial communication, the voices of another or physical contact but we are not alone in that. If we had a hive mentality we would know that but we don't. So it is all about learning about whom you are and living with that person. Realize there are others out there that are exactly the same and just maybe ... just maybe it will take the top off of the loneliness that you feel at 3:17 in the morning or whenever in your day loneliness becomes invasive.

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.” ~Paul Tillich