Every once in a great while you get a very quick glimpse of the fact that you are spiritually alone. How much more alone can a human being be than when all of the psychological props are pulled out from under him or her? Every shattered dream and every crisis brings us back to that moment in which we realize that inwardly we are alone, with nothing and no one to lean on.
We must see the fact that one day our physical bodies will expire -- it's just a fact. Everything will disappear in the stream of passing time. But we resist this fact with all of our might, and as a result we miss the realization that God is trying to give us about the necessity of being alone. We think that we can hide from something that we don't want to see about ourselves, but that is impossible. How can we hide from something unless we have already seen it as being a fact?
It is only when you are really alone that you are not alone in the truest sense. Spiritually speaking, we live with the mistaken idea that we have something outside of ourselves that we can count on. There is only one thing that can be counted on, and it is only found when we are truly alone, with ourselves and within ourselves. We deliberately keep ourselves so insanely busy in order to avoid seeing this inevitable need for silence and solitude. Do you really think that you can put off being alone? Something within you thinks it can. In those moments when life takes something from you that you wrongly value, work to realize that you do not have to replace it with yet another empty activity.