Sweet Sorrow

Aloneness has in it both a sort of sadness, a sort of sorrow, and yet a very deep peace and silence. So it depends on you how you look at it.
When you are separated from your lover, look at it as a great opportunity to be alone. Then the vision changes. Look at it as an opportunity to have your own space. It becomes very difficult to have one’s own space, and unless you have your own space, you will never become acquainted with your own being, you will never come to know who you are. Always engaged, always occupied in a thousand and one things—in relationship, in worldly affairs, anxieties, plans, future, past—one continuously lives on the surface.
When one is alone one can Start settling, sinking in. Because you are not occupied you will not feel the way you have always been feeling. It will be different, and that difference can feel strange.
And certainly when one is separated one misses one’s lovers, beloveds, friends, but this is not going to be forever. It is just a small discipline. And if you love yourself deeply and go down into yourself, you will be ready to love even more deeply because one who does not know oneself cannot love very deeply. If you live on the surface, your relationship cannot be of the depths. It is your relationship, after all. If you have a depth, then your relationship will have a depth.
So take this opportunity as a blessing and move into it. Enjoy it. If you become too sorrowful, the whole opportunity is wasted.

And it is not against love, remember. Don’t feel guilty. In fact it is the very source of love. Love is not what is ordinarily known as love. It is not that. It is not a stew of sentimentality, emotions, feelings. It is something very deep, very foundational. It is a state of mind, and that state of mind is possible only when you penetrate your own being, when you start loving yourself. That is the meditation when one is alone: to love oneself so deeply that for the first time you become your own love object.
So in these days when you are alone, be a narcissist; love yourself, enjoy yourself! Delight in your body, in your mind, in your soul. And enjoy the space that is empty around you and fill it with love. The lover is not there—fill it with love! Spread your love around your space, and your space will start becoming luminous; it will glow. And then for the first time you will know, when your lover comes close to you, that now it is a totally different quality. In fact you have something to give, share. Now you can share your space because you have your space.
Ordinarily people think that they are sharing, but they don’t have anything to share—no poetry in their heart, no love. In fact when they say they want to share, they don’t want to give, because they don’t have anything to give. They are in search of getting something from the other and the other is also in the same boat. He is searching to get something from you, and you are searching to get something from him. Both are in a way trying to rob the other of something. Hence the conflict between lovers, the tension; the continuous tension to dominate, to possess, to exploit, to make the other a means for your pleasure; somehow to use the other for your gratification. Of course we hide in beautiful words. We say, “We want to share,” but how can you share if you don’t have?
So enjoy this space, aloneness. Don’t fill it with past memories and don’t fill it with future imagination and fantasy. Let it be as it is—pure, simple, silent. Delight in it; sway, sing, dance. A sheer joy of being alone.
And don’t feel guilty. That too is a problem because lovers always feel guilty. If they are alone and they are happy, they feel a certain guilt. They think, “How can you be happy when your lover is not with you?”—as if you are cheating the person. But if you are not happy when you are alone, how can you be happy when you are together? So it is not a question of cheating anybody. In the night, when nobody is looking at the rosebush, it is preparing the rose. Deep down inthe earth, the roots are preparing the rose. Nobody is looking there. If the rosebush thinks, “I will show my roses only when people are around,” then it will not have anything to show. It will not have anything to share, because whatever you can share has first to be created, and all creativity arises out of the depths of aloneness.
So let this aloneness be a womb, and enjoy and delight in it; don’t feel that you are doing something wrong. It is a question of attitude and approach. Don’t give it a wrong interpretation. It need not be sorrowful. It can be tremendously peaceful and blissful. It depends on you.