Many thanks to Zac Hicks for participating in Hope for the Lonely: On the Record Q&A.

Have you noticed all of the attention given to loneliness lately? Here are some recent articles about loneliness that caught my attention:

My experiences have shown me that loneliness is pretty complicated, so I don’t believe spiritual Band-Aid solutions will work. If we slow down and notice what’s going on in our hearts and souls, we might discover the loneliness returns within minutes or hours or days. We might find there’s a lingering sense of loneliness that really might never go away as long as we are inhabitants of this world.

Some of us feel the depth of our loneliness more intensely because of our wiring or our wounds or both. But I’m convinced all of us know some degree of loneliness even though we don’t talk about it. Well, I’ve seen poets talk about it. Poets are great at naming what the rest of us want to avoid. We walk around with smiles plastered on our faces, numbing our loneliness or misnaming it or camouflaging its secrecy with busy-ness and denial.