“They all lonely in their own way.”
Sam Selvon
The Lonely Londoners
They Are All Lonely in Their Own Way
My wife and I met a couple in the supermarket this evening.
A Caribbean couple. Nothing dramatic—just a few exchanged words, a moment of encouragement, a shared smile. Yet as my wife and I walked away, we both noticed the same thing: a warmth lingered. It felt unforced, generous, quietly alive. It didn’t surprise us to learn that they were Christians. Some people carry their faith not as volume, but as light. This is not to say that we do not find warmth in all kind humans we meet, it is just that our inbuilt antennae feel a God who directs Christians in our life’s pathway.
Their presence stirred a memory from my university days, studying literature. I thought of Sam Selvon, part of the Windrush generation, and of his novel The Lonely Londoners. One line from it has never left me: “They all lonely in their own way.”
Selvon’s genius lies in how effortlessly that sentence lands. It sounds almost casual, as if spoken in passing. And yet inside it is whole lives—exile, hope, humour, and the quiet ache of never fully belonging. Loneliness, in Selvon’s world, isn’t always loud. Often, it’s lived with dignity, even laughter, while something deeper goes unnamed.
The truth is, we all carry an inner loneliness that rises to the surface from time to time. It can feel especially sharp when someone finds themselves in a foreign land and in cities like London or Manchester or Glasgow—places dense with people yet strangely capable of making one feel invisible. Selvon reminds us that beneath accents, histories, and faces lies a shared human vulnerability.
That is why a smile matters. A moment of welcome. A brief, gentle conversation that says, you are seen. Such small gestures invite someone, if only for a moment, back into the wider human family.
This brings me to a much older story, one that still breathes with relevance.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 4, a woman comes to draw water from a well at midday. That detail matters. Women usually went together in the cool of the morning or evening. Midday signals heat, solitude, avoidance. She has chosen the hour when no one else will be there.
Why?
She has been married five times and is now living with a man who is not her husband. In her culture, this history carries deep stigma; especially for a woman. People would have talked. Judged. Kept their distance.
Over time, such judgment does more than isolate socially; it erodes the spirit. It teaches a person to move through the world unnoticed, to expect dismissal.
What is quietly heart breaking is that her loneliness is not simply about being alone. It is about being unseen, unvalued, gently but firmly written off.
And this is where the story turns luminous.
Jesus chooses to meet her there. Not in a crowd. Not in a synagogue. But in the heat of the day, at the very place she goes when she believes no one else will come.
The encounter is gentle, yet radical. He does not treat her loneliness as failure or punishment. He treats it as holy ground; the place where kindness arrives first.
Perhaps this is the thread that binds Selvon’s Londoners, the woman at the well, and us. We are all lonely in our own way. But loneliness is not the end of the story. It can become the meeting place where compassion interrupts isolation, where a stranger becomes a neighbour, where God steps quietly into the ordinary and says, I see you and I send someone your way.
And sometimes, all it takes to begin that moment is a smile in a supermarket aisle.