I found myself in the passenger's seat on a long stretch of highway somewhere in the Arizona desert, sobbing.
I had been mulling this concept over for months, but it finally came to a head: the saddest part about being alive is the separateness. Yes, I know that every spiritual teaching shows us that this separation is an illusion, but that illusion I am living in. I crave so deeply to connect, to understand, to empathize and to walk in another human's shoes.
I want to never be able to judge because I know so well what the other person is going through. I want oneness. I want wholeness. I want intimacy with the entire universe.
I want to merge.
I don't want this separateness. I want to understand and be understood.
"I'm so lonely." I whispered as tears streamed down my face, "Everyone is so lonely."
"Do you remember the part about the buckets in the book, Untamed?" My friend asked me from the driver's seat.
"No, actually." I said, "can we listen to it on Audible?"
As it turns out, the author Glennon Doyle's daughter had a similar harrowing epiphany about the loneliness of life and her mother replied, “I told her that maybe when we were born, we were poured from our source into these tiny body buckets. When we die, we’ll be emptied back out and return to that big source and to each other. Maybe dying is just returning—back out from these tiny containers to where we belong. Maybe then all the achy separation we feel down here will disappear, because we’ll be mixed together again. No difference between you and me. No more buckets, no more skin—all sea.”
"I hear you," my boyfriend said empathetically as I explained this painful realization I had when I got home, "but it's exactly that."
"What do you mean?" I asked, confused.
"That understanding that only you can have with you. The sacredness in your experience with yourself. Only you."
I tilted my head in awe.
"I think it's beautiful." He said.
