Few songs have touched my own sense of loneliness like Simon & Garfunkels ”I´m a rock”.
I still remember being a teenager with a lot of people I knew and almost no friends, feeling strange and outside everything, and listening to Paul Simon as he managed to put words to my feelings.
Judging from how popular this song was I wasn´t the only one who connected to these lyrics!
”A winters day, in a deep and dark december, I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock, I am an island.
I´ve built walls, a fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock, I am an island.
Don´t talk of love, I´ve heard the word before;
It´s sleeping in my memory.
I won´t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock, I am an island.
I have my books and my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock, I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries”
If we give in to this kind of response to disappointment and loneliness, if we choose to hide, to close the door and let no one in, to put up so many defences that in the end nobody can reach us anymore, then we have chosen a strategy of survival that will destroy us in the end.
It doesn´t protect you from bitterness or from any other kind of destructive feelings, it doesn´t protect you from the evil words or acts of other people, but it does very effectively close out all friendship, all love, all good things that might come your way!
This kind of shield and armour produces the opposite of what the lonely and hurt imagines it would bring!
Ever since Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves among the bushes in the Garden of Eden, this has been Man´s instinct. To run and hide, in order to protect themselves.
And it kills us, because we weren´t made for loneliness!
And when I myself remember how I felt back then, fortyfive years ago, I realize once again how fantastic it is that I got saved, that someone handed me my invitation to go home to my Father, come to the one place from which I shall never get thrown out.
I´ll never be alone again…