![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, freezing or numbing out can work as a survival trick for a while, but if we remain asleep, particularly as a society, we face our collective demise.” When we can’t fight or flee from a horrible threat, we lie down and play dead – we freeze. It’s an evolutionary response to shut down and go numb like this. And that we’d be revisiting it many times over. The 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas described it as “the sorrow of the world”, this moral “asleepness.” As I ventured into the early stages of this journey, I quickly realized it was at the root of our disconnect from this one wild and precious life we’d been granted. ![]() The Greeks argued that this kind of moral loneliness led to acedia – a state of spiritual apathy or listless sloth. You are suspended in a vague and directionless vastness. When you don’t know your true north, the disorientation is terrifying. We can’t tap into the point of life, to what matters. Moral loneliness is when the supply cord to connection, caring and doing the right thing by each other and the planet has been severed. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves. “It’s a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. ![]()
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