Nobody is Alone.
Photo of the poem, The Snow Day, as seen in early September 2025.
Today’s blog post is inspired by the poem above. I first encountered this poem by Kim Nam Jo in a bathroom stall at the University for Peace campus in San Jose, Costa Rica. If you’ve read any of my previous blogs from last summer/fall, you may remember that I am enrolled in a Diploma Program through UPEACE’s Centre for Executive Education. The irony of seeing this poem during an in-person course was that I felt quite alone. The group was all bilingual (except for me). Most of the group was also Gen Z (I’m a Millenial). And everyone else had been born in Costa Rica or living there for decades. I had been in the country for less than a year at that point, with quite a few trips out.
A deeper irony or intuition, maybe, was that I took a photo of this poem about winter and the feeling of being alone before winter and experiencing the kind of loneliness I have in the past few weeks.
I recently spent a few days in snowy Chicago, where I was anything but alone - visiting dear friends. But, the weeks prior to that, I was in and out of spaces of being alone and traveling a lot. This poem hits me hard, especially the lines below.
It is such a great reminder that we are in fact not alone, ever. Even when we think we are solitary and feeling the well of loneliness, nature is with us, constantly. And, the reality is that we also probably have a small or large group of humans and pets (physically nearby or not) that are in our hearts and whose hearts we are in. It can sound corny and trite, but the truth is imho that for most of us, we think of our beloveds much more than we reach out to tell them that we are and we love them and they are not alone. A practice I’ve been trying to do more of is tell the people in my life that I love them and am thinking of them. I have been censoring myself less in that respect. We never know how alone someone might be feeling and how receiving a message of care like this could really turn their perspective around.
A friend told me as advice for solo travel and working through hard things that “The quietest times are the loudest.” Aka when we are by ourselves, physically, the mind is most active. Our fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams, all of it can bubble up and we may be forced to sit with our feelings and thoughts when there. I definitely experienced the reality of that for myself during quiet times, and it allowed me to appreciate how I can be in the world alone and be okay and be in the world with beloved and new friends and strangers and be okay, as well.
I hope that The Snow Day brings you as much hope and comfort as it does me, especially if you live in the Northern Hemisphere and are experiencing the depth of winter right now.
The last photo is out of my hotel window in downtown Chicago on a snowy January day.
