I feel so alone — like no one is really there for me
After the leaving, the silence may not be loneliness but solitude with one companion.
There is a particular ache in feeling that no one is really there — that you could call everyone you know and still feel unaccompanied. Sometimes it follows a leaving: a job, a marriage, a city, a faith you walked out of. Sometimes it has no cause you can point to. The days go quiet, and the quiet starts to feel like proof that you are, finally, on your own.
Tukaram does not argue you out of the feeling. He goes further into it than most would dare — in one abhang he calls himself a paradēśī, a foreigner in his own world, with the whole world standing around merely watching and no one offering pity. He knows the bleakness from the inside. But his answer turns on a single distinction: there is loneliness (deprivation, abandonment) and there is एकांत (ekānta, solitude) — and the difference between them is whether you can sense that something is experiencing all of this along with you. He keeps pointing to a companion who does not leave when everyone else does.
His claim is not that you will stop being alone. It is that the aloneness, looked at closely, already has someone in it — and that this one companion, the dhaṇī (the master within), turns out to be enough. The loneliness was real; it was also, he insists, the only thing standing between you and noticing who was there the whole time.
Abhang 15 — Solitude that already has someone in it
फावला एकांत एकविध भाव । हरि आम्हांसवें सर्व भोगी ॥२॥
This abhang is for exactly the silence you are describing — the quiet after a leaving that you expected to feel like company and instead feels like absence. Tukaram offers a different reading: this may not be loneliness but एकांत, solitude with a quiet companion in it — Hari experiences everything together with us. The test he gives is simple and concrete: is there a sense that someone or something is undergoing this alongside you? If yes, what you have is not deprivation but accompaniment, and the move is not to refill the silence with substitutes but to inhabit it.
Abhang 49 — Wherever you look, a parent
पाहें तिकडे बापमाय । विठ्ठल आहे रखुमाई ॥ध्रु.॥
When the difference between being-with-people and being-alone has stopped feeling meaningful — when crowd and solitude both feel empty — Tukaram says the emptiness is a misreading. Wherever I look, mother-and-father: Vitthal and Rukhumai. The forest is not empty and the crowd is not exhausting, because in both there is a parental presence to be met. The proof that no place is truly deserted is that every place has become homely — and the felt sign of it is that one finds oneself, against expectation, dancing out of sheer wonder. The lonely room is populated; you have been reading it as vacant.
Abhang 1781 — The foreigner whom one still does not abandon
जन साहेभूत असे या सकळां । मी एक निराळा परदेशी ॥५॥
This is the bleakest of them, and the most honest — Tukaram refuses to pretend the loneliness away. He is tired; even mother and father, the closest companions, will in the end hand the soul over; the world stands around as a mere witness and shelters no one; I am one apart, the paradēśī, the foreigner. That is the very feeling of "no one is really there for me," named without flinching. And then the turn: no pity from anyone, in any way — except you, Hari. When every other support is gone, exactly one remains, and on that one alone he stakes his trust, releasing all other hopes. The answer to total aloneness is not a crowd; it is the single companion who does not leave with the rest.
Abhang 1372 — With the master beside you, no one can come in the way
सवें असतां धणी । आड येऊं न सके कोणी ॥२॥
For when the loneliness has hardened into a sense that you are unprotected and exposed, Tukaram offers an image of a dhaṇī — a master — within. When the sun has risen, he says, every lamp becomes pointless; you do not light a candle against the day. So too, with this one presence dwelling in your antara (your innermost being), no separate prop is needed: when the master is together with me, no one can come in the way. The cause of it is not effort or ritual but prīti, javaḷī — love, near at hand. You are not unaccompanied and you are not unguarded; the companion is already close.
Abhang 209 — The meek one is not left out
दीन होतां कांहीं । होऊं नेदी वेगळें ॥ध्रु.॥
If your loneliness comes braided with a fear of being left out — that everyone else belongs and you do not — this abhang answers it tenderly and precisely. Tukaram draws a sharp line: lāja, shame, the self-reproach that performs unworthiness, keeps you outside the feast; but dīna, honest lowliness without performance, is not let to be apart. Krishna knows the interior and does not desert the one who simply stands with hands joined. You do not need the right method or the right standing to be included. You need only to stop hiding behind shame and let the honest, small, lonely self be seen — for that self is exactly the one who is never left out.
In one breath
Tukaram's answer to "no one is really there for me" is not to deny the silence but to look again at who is inside it: the quiet you took for abandonment is ekānta, solitude already accompanied. So today, instead of rushing to refill the loneliness with people or distractions, sit in it long enough to feel for the one companion who did not leave when the others did — and let that nearness be enough.