Daily Life,  I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation,  Reflections

The Chamber of Loneliness

January 16, 2022 /


I was born into this world with certain things intact. The color of my skin, my eyes, my hair. The size and proportion of my skeletal frame. A certain personality and a particular temperament. Specific and focused interests. A drive towards thinking about and seeking to fully experience the spiritual, the transcendent.

Like all sons of Adam, my life has been a scattered path of trying to make sense of the damage that occurs when my interests and desires have not dovetailed with my abilities and personality. For example, I was born with some musical talent and the ability to write competently, but neither of these artistic areas ever led to a career path because they slammed up hard against the quartz wall of my innate laziness and the bone-deep sense that things simply aren’t going to work out well for me, something akin to the “I was born under a bad sign” mentality. I neither was, nor am I, too lazy to actually write or to practice an instrument, but I have repeatedly found myself too indolent to do the administrative leg work necessary to aggressively seek a publisher or an agent. I have battled this gloomy negativity all my life. My wife’s many years of steady encouragement and clearly genuine belief in me have made my daily sojourn so much better than it would have been without her, but even her faithful presence and help have not been able to cut from my neck this weighty millstone of self-pessimism. I doubt that it will ever drop off in this life.

I spent my twenties and thirties convinced that I was a very, very smart young man. Smarter than most of the people I knew, in fact. Entering middle age, I softened into the realization that what I had once mistaken for intelligence was simply energy and impatience. Also a factor was encountering some truly intelligent people and realizing that I would never be able to hold my own with such people.

So, too, with my interior life. When I was all churched-up in the Protestant world, I enjoyed — or thought I enjoyed — the syllogisms and debates and deconstructions common among the men. I later realized that I could participate in such shadowboxing because there’s really nothing very rigorous about it. One merely has to learn a few buzzwords, a collection of pat phrases, a certain faux-gravitas and steepling of the fingers, and one can come across as quite the apologist. I also realized as time passed that most of the men with whom I jousted were not particularly intelligent; they were merely pushy. I had myself become pushy, formulaic, technique-bound, like a mediocre martial arts teacher. I walked away from all of that.

My spiritual path, maze-like and disjointed as it has been, has led me to readings on the internet. I’ve gone through phases of the sorts of things I enjoy, and not long ago my musings brought me to fresh realizations. I realized that many of the blogs and sites I frequent are maintained by people so much smarter than I am that I feel as if I have developed some sort of spiritual retardation. I believe I benefit from much of my online reading, but I am increasingly aware that I simply do not — and cannot — think along the same lines as these people. This does not depress me, not in the least. But it does bring me back around to the realization that I am, on the inside, a profoundly slothful man.

And sloth has a peculiar cost. It can seal a man into a chamber of loneliness, where he sits separated from others, even those he loves. And in those hours of inner separation, he is aware of all that he has not done, all that he has failed to do, all that he had not even attempted…and he becomes aware that he doesn’t even have the gumption to try and motivate himself, or to think his way out of the chamber in which he has welded himself.

Books help. And music. And deep, wide-ranging conversations with his wife. But in the stillness of the day or the night, the mentally slothful man truly believes that things will never change, that there is no use in trying. And he steps outside and feels the bite of winter on his cheeks and watches the birds scrambling at the feeders and the dogs prancing in the snow, and the day is enough for him. He is in the chamber of loneliness, but he does get to leave it from time to time, and the air outside is sweet and cold and clean.

But back inside, things are probably not going to work out.

~ S.K. Orr

8 Comments

  • Brian

    January 22, 2022 at 1:39 am

    Thanks for your honest writing, I feel much the same at times.
    God will squeeze some good out of us, in spite of our lazy tendancies.

  • NLR

    January 18, 2022 at 12:18 pm

    Interesting post. What you said about trying to express one’s interests amid the circumstances of life reminded me of some things from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which I recently listened to.

    Franklin talks about an uncle:

    “John was bred a dyer, I believe of woollens, Benjamin was bred a silk dyer, serving an apprenticeship at London. He was an ingenious man. I remember him well, for when I was a boy he came over to my father in Boston, and lived in the house with us some years. He lived to a great age. His grandson, Samuel Franklin, now lives in Boston. He left behind him two quarto volumes, MS., of his own poetry, consisting of little occasional pieces addressed to his friends and relations, of which the following, sent to me, is a specimen. He had formed a short-hand of his own, which he taught me, but, never practising it, I have now forgot it. I was named after this uncle, there being a particular affection between him and my father. He was very pious, a great attender of sermons of the best preachers, which he took down in his short-hand, and had with him many volumes of them. He was also much of a politician; too much, perhaps, for his station. There fell lately into my hands, in London, a collection he had made of all the principal pamphlets relating to public affairs, from 1641 to 1717; many of the volumes are wanting as appears by the numbering, but there still remain eight volumes in folio, and twenty-four in quarto and in octavo. A dealer in old books met with them, and knowing me by my sometimes buying of him, he brought them to me. It seems my uncle must have left them here when he went to America, which was about fifty years since. There are many of his notes in the margins.”

    Another intersting anecdote is when Franklin was in London, lodging in a boarding house run by a Catholic:

    “In a garret of her house there lived a maiden lady of seventy, in the most retired manner, of whom my landlady gave me this account: that she was a Roman Catholic, had been sent abroad when young, and lodg’d in a nunnery with an intent of becoming a nun; but, the country not agreeing with her, she returned to England, where, there being no nunnery, she had vow’d to lead the life of a nun, as near as might be done in those circumstances. Accordingly, she had given all her estate to charitable uses, reserving only twelve pounds a year to live on, and out of this sum she still gave a great deal in charity, living herself on water-gruel only, and using no fire but to boil it. She had lived many years in that garret, being permitted to remain there gratis by successive Catholic tenants of the house below, as they deemed it a blessing to have her there. A priest visited her to confess her every day. “I have ask’d her,” says my landlady, “how she, as she liv’d, could possibly find so much employment for a confessor?” “Oh,” said she, “it is impossible to avoid vain thoughts.” I was permitted once to visit her. She was cheerful and polite, and convers’d pleasantly. The room was clean, but had no other furniture than a matras, a table with a crucifix and book, a stool which she gave me to sit on, and a picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica displaying her handkerchief, with the miraculous figure of Christ’s bleeding face on it, which she explained to me with great seriousness. She look’d pale, but was never sick; and I give it as another instance on how small an income, life and health may be supported.”

  • JAMES

    January 16, 2022 at 3:31 pm

    The times we are in have made a vast number of people believe that this is the new normal from here on. While I believe it can be such, I also believe it does not have to be so.

    People seem at any time to dwell on things that they failed to do rather the many things they accomplished; but even more so when gloom and doom seem to be all they see.

    You have quite a laundry list of things you feel are failures and I would bet that if you made another list of accomplishments you may well see that the scale is greatly tipped in your favor. To top it off, the game is far from over, you still have time on the clock.

    Since you are in Texas I’ll suggest that you cowboy up.
    I’m in Oregon and followed my dad and a couple of uncles into the woods. They would all be telling me to “logger up kid”.

    Either way, I’ll be in prayer for you brother. 🙂

      • James

        January 17, 2022 at 7:51 am

        I fear that I have missed the actual point of the original post my friend. As I get on in years this this seems to be the case more often than not. Many times I find myself being far too blunt.
        Prayer is an excellent medium for me as the reciever knows exactly what I’m trying to say.
        Take care, and best to you brother.