Thought Picnic: Picking up the rice where the wedding has been

We are social animals

I was watching a nature programme probably on the BBC about an ape colony. The alpha male had just been beaten in a fight with an upstart and the social rules within such colonies required the vanquished leave that community.

What was so profound was how in the space of weeks the vanquished had acquired deathly pallor as he wasted away without care in loneliness and dejection.

Then I wondered about us human-beings as social animals who may decide we need our space, but we cannot be totally bereft of interaction and that to the extent of companionship, relationship and even love.

The fear of loneliness

The fear that threatens the sanity of lonely people who for all sorts of reasons live in cities and yet are hermits, secluded from the vitality of fun and banter than comes for well-developed friendships.

Many single people by choice or by situation exist sometimes without an inkling as to how to change things to develop a social life. The answer is not just getting out, there is more to getting that expression of engagement than just being out there as I noted in my last blog.

Even those of us who appear to be extroverted are probably only so when the setting is familiar, I have been at parties where until someone comes to chat to me, I probably would not do much more than try to be inconspicuous.

Change is not easy

My voice in probably stronger in my writing, it is also asynchronous, yet, in a business setting as at work, I might well have a more assertive persona, at least, and that must be why none of my managers ever recommended me for an assertiveness course.

Assertiveness however does not make up for handling the more social element of cultivating relationships of the heart. In essence, we all desire to a point, someone to be near us, to share with, to care for and to dare with, that someone I lost 5 years ago, yet, the need for someone still matters, not to forget the lost, but to appreciate again the gift of someone who can touch the heart.

If we had the choice, may we never become another Eleanor Rigby; the haunting words of a song that tells a very sad story of loneliness.

Eleanor Rigby

(John Lennon, Paul McCartney)
AZLyrics

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
What does he care?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people (Ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all belong?