Morning Friend,
I offer up to your contemplative mind today, the words of the immortal Roy Orbison...
"...only the lonely, dum dum dum dumdy-doo-wah..."
While many associate Roy's fame with his trademark Wayfarer shades and his warbling falsetto, it is deep and insightful lyrics such as these which stand him in my good stead.
Being the hopeless romantic that I am, and considering the self-imposed "relationship hiatus" I've been on for the past few years, I am especially sensitive to such deep emotional tugs.
Of course someone with less tightly wound heartstrings might be less inclined to be so moved, but even one with a "hardened heart" is not "heart-LESS" and therefore not completely immune to Roy's magical refrain.
I ask the question, (less succinctly perhaps than Roy's "dum dum dum"), "who is not human, that has not felt the dark pang of loneliness?"
Where a single "dum" would have been sufficient, notice Roy adds a second for emphasis and ultimately a tri-fecta of "dums" symbolizing a TRIANGLE, of loss, pain and emptiness; the lonely trio inherent to our human condition.
In those "dums" I hear the echoing cries of newborn baby lonely for a mother he barely knows, and the aching sobs of a widower longing for wife who'd become all he knew.
And like the painful reminder of a nasty wound, I hear all too well my own anguished cries of spiritual loneliness when my world had become a tragic triangle of dums. ( or in retrospect "dumbs"?)
"Only the lonely", intones Roy, whether through unforeseen circumstance or self-imposed, self-destructive antipathy, can truly know the insidious and relentlessly heart-wrenching nature of spriritual and emotional solitude.
Now before you suggest I'm reading quite a bit into a few "dums" which some might attribute as mere syncopatic syllables inherent to much of that era's music such as "doo-wops" and "sha-la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la", allow me to clarify by including what I believe belongs in any discussion on such a broadly applicable topic as human suffering.
And that would be Hope.
Or as Roy so beautifully puts it, "...dumdy-do-wah".
I ask you, ( as Roy does so subtly), "So long as we have breath fueling our beating hearts, and the desire to fill its' void, is there not always hope?"
Slightly hidden as it may be, within this anthemic song of heartache lies a message for us all who have walked the stoop-shouldered walk of longing, who've dreamed of fulfillment, prayed for redemption, and cried until tearless; "dumdy-do-wah!" ...."There IS hope"!
By golly I'm HERE as a living testament to realized hope...ACTION sprung from wishes, REALITY emerging from need and SUCCESS resulting from change.
I can't obviously express myself with the eloquence of Roy Orbison but I can tell you a few things about conquering loneliness my friend....
"Shooby-do!"....If you've got a spiritual void in your life, then you need to simply ASK and the Good Lord awaits.
"Do-wop!"...If your dance card is collecting dust instead of dates then you need to clean up your act...get to the gym, take some classes get out of the house and AMONG the living.
"Wanga-dang!"....If it's booze or drugs that's isolating you from life then get your lonely butt to one of a HUNDRED meeting places in this town where hope springs eternal.
"Shoop doop"....DO THE MATH -take but a few moments out of your despairing and do an inventory of your life, multiply it by how much worse it could be, divide it into workable short term goals and begin subtracting yourself from the ranks of the lonely.
You'll have to pardon me for taking some leaps of imagination over founts of optimism here. ( yes they ARE giving poetic licenses to just anybody nowadays! )
I do sow upon soil only recently made arable and highly vulnerable to the whims of nature.
Only the lonely, of whom I am a paid-up alumnus, tend to get a might over-exuberant when the void of hopelessness becomes replaced by something so much the more substantive....like love.
I'm not talking through my hat here....I'm singing through it.
love tImMy:/
Laugh as much as you breathe....
Love as long as you live ( in song)
