by Vera Grant AMMM                                            Ireland                                23.04.2024

I don’t like it when my neighbours go away. I don’t like the automatic lights that invisibly switch themselves on at a set time. I know they are not there and I feel alone, isolated and a sense of abandonment.

It’s as if I have lost my connection with people…..people I know, talk to, recognise and share similar interests. It’s not a new phenomena for me.

How many windows have I looked out and found myself alone?

In China where I had gone to teach for a year, I will never forget standing at my bedroom window and seeing nothing but concrete buildings stretching across what seemed like miles of flat ground, no hills, no mountains just flatness.
If anything should happen to me, I thought, I will never be found in this concrete jungle. For the first time in my life I understood the saying, ‘we are smaller than a grain of sand.’ It was a desolate moment.

to a smaller house in more recent years and after all the helpers had left I found myself once again gazing out of a window, a small pane of glass in the front door. This is my home now, I said to myself, and I don’t know anybody, and no-one knows me.

And yes that has long since changed and I am no longer the newcomer but when my neighbours recently went to Australia for six weeks the old familiar thoughts started to unfold. I was aware that this is a real disconnect in my life so was glad of the Lenten retreat in March, ‘Hope begins when I stand in the dark looking out at the light.’

I can change how I perceive these situations and this ability to shift my perception was enhanced further in the MMM Lenten online retreat on the value of Interconnectedness where ‘everything exists in communion with everything else.’
I am not alone, I have my faith, I am a child of God, I have family and friends who love me and I love them, I have the garden, my books, bridge, Pilates and the list goes on….I have an abundance.

Turning away from the window I smile at my fortitude, in looking back I lift my eyes and see other lights shining in houses, not far way with people in them. I am not alone.