by Simone Abbot
“So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
I had mixed feelings about voluntary redundancies. Was an employee smart to accept a payout, or ‘deadwood’? And in accepting one, would a stigma follow me?
Some called me brave. But I’d had health issues galore — even scheduling an MRI to eliminate early-onset dementia — and I rationalised that accepting a payout made sense. I was just following my nose. I’d lost the taste for work; I’d write. Like The Alchemist, the universe was leading me to my heart’s longings!
But after making such a song and dance about accepting the VR to write, when the writing expectations joined forces with the shame, the paralysis arrived. I found myself wordless. I struggled to do anything.
Of course, no one could know. So I’d stick my nose in the air and head off to my local cafe, like I had it all together, swapping lazy adjectives for nouns with grunt, wrestling with the voices in my head saying I didn’t deserve to spend my fixed income on an editor because my writing was crap.
I was in a bind. I couldn’t will myself forward to write, and I couldn’t go back to what I was before, such a busy worker longing for the time and space to write. So I stood perfectly still, taking shallow gasps. Mouth-breathing.
Without work to occupy my time, this world was lonely, surrounded on all sides by the neighbours I’d steadfastly ignored for so long. It’d always been easier to rush, head down, from driveway to door. For once I was grateful for what winter thrust upon me: I bunkered down indoors, keeping to myself.
The thing gladdening my heart at this time was my succulents, forcing me to use my hands to choose design, colour and pattern. I snipped, pruned and hacked out all the deadwood, doing with my succulents what I couldn’t do with my writing.
I learnt that succulents are very forgiving critters, notwithstanding the savagery of the attack on them. When spring followed the winter of my discontent as surely it must, my succulents paid forth a dividend on all my editorial efforts, shooting forth a bounty of glossy lime and turgid sage.
What else could I do but display them? I owed them.
But where?
After all those COVID years spent out back on the relative privacy of our deck, something drew me towards the front garden.
And so I just followed my nose. I joined my local ‘buy nothing’ group, collected pots, demanded cuttings and dragged a table out front.
And one day, I decided it was time to be brave. I would invite my neighbours over. And the entry charge? Succulent cuttings!
I talked myself into adding my mobile number to the invites I prepared to pop into my neighbours’ postboxes, and later brushed off any neighbours’ texts received in reply saying ‘Sorry, busy’. I breathed deep, baked a cake and dressed the table. Even if it was just me all alone in my front garden of succulents, Nigel No-Friends once again, it’d still be worth it. I would raise my chin high. I had my succulents for company.
But I was never so relieved on that blustery spring day when the first of seven households arrived, in our street of twenty.
Tibetan nun Pema Chödrön writes that ‘hot’ loneliness keeps to itself, feeling shame, wanting no one else to see your insides, while ‘cool’ loneliness accepts what is, creating space for other lonely souls to enter.
There is no shame in ‘cool loneliness’. Only the hope that a loneliness warrior following their nose might, in the next breath, encounter another lonely warrior.
And guess what? The nation’s capital, Canberra — my home — records the highest levels of loneliness in Australia.
Breathe deep, fellow loneliness warriors, for we have work to do.
© Simone Abbot 2026
~ Adapted from Simone Abbot’s award-winning 400-word entry to the 2025 ‘Tell Us Your Story’ competition run by Neighbours Every Day: https://neighbourseveryday.org/day-of-action/tell-us-your-story-past-winners/
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