Solitude, Part One: Living Well Alone

The COVID-19 pandemic has relegated most people to their homes.  In many countries, people are burrowed deep in their nests.  The streets are desolate, the parks empty.  There are countless others who have no roof over their heads and must seek precarious shelter.  For them, the risk of contagion is heightened, if not imminent.

Solitude: an invitation to spaciousness

Different nations have issued varying levels of physical isolation.  Spain and Italy are in lockdown, as is New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.  In British Columbia, where I live, the authorities have ordered people to stay home.  As millions spend more time inside, there is significant rise in the demand for streaming services and online shopping.  In isolation, the need for social contact migrates onto virtual spaces, as people take to social media and online platforms to check in with friends and family.  Combined with the torrents of worrisome news that pours through the airwaves, people can be held captive to the screen, unable to peel their eyes from the digital stimuli that bombard the mind.

This time of isolation can present an opportunity to explore the benefits of solitude, which I believe can offer insight and solace in these frightening times.  Not everyone who is in isolation lives alone, of course.  However, I believe that the benefits of solitude can apply to those who live with others.  To begin, solitude has less to do with an external set of conditions (as if one has to be completely alone), and more to do with intention.  Alice Koller once wrote:

To lone (I am inventing the verb) is to become oneself and thereby to be able to spend

one’s time pursuing one’s purposes independently of the presence or absence of other

human beings.  You lone in the process of becoming able to be alone well, but also in the

practice of being alone well[1].

Solitude is precisely this ability live well on one’s own.  It matters less whether there are others around — of greater importance is whether one is at home with oneself.  In a letter to Blake, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “it’s not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company grows thinner and thinner til there is not at all”[2].  The solitary person, therefore, is better described as independent rather than anti-social.

 Society sees togetherness as an unquestionable default, and thus solitude is perceived as a deviation from the norm.  However, in a world that cannot stop talking, solitude offers a rare opportunity for reflection.  Togetherness can be oppressive if one is always toeing to expectations, navigating opinions, and adhering to convention. Further, our social personas are often attached to assigned roles and responsibilities.  We work as drivers, nurses, teachers, waiters, and grocers — in our daily exchange, we perform our roles and shape ourselves to meet our responsibilities.  Yet the roles we play cannot adequately express the fluid vibrancy of personhood.  Although I love working as a teacher, I am not bound by my job as a teacher. This recognition does not diminish my commitment to my profession, but helps me attend to the aspects of myself that cannot be domesticated by the familiar roles that others hold me to. In the spaciousness of solitude, away from the clamorous noises that vie for attention, I can listen again to myself, to the whispers of intuition, and the reassurance of inner wisdom.

Of course, it’s not all sunsets and butterflies.  The solitary person is sometimes assailed by loneliness.  Admittedly, loneliness is difficult, and chronic loneliness can be detrimental. However, for most of us, the occasional bout of loneliness has its place within a healthy emotional life. More importantly, we should not shun loneliness, as if its appearance must compel us to escape.  To long for the company of others is a natural and healthy part of a social instinct but we need not be ruled by every impulse.  With some curiosity and poise, we can become more familiar with loneliness and witness its operation.  If I am willing to befriend loneliness, I might understand something of my own needs and tendencies, how relationship weaves the fibre of my own being.  I remember sitting in meditation many years ago, when my mind flooded with tender memories of my mother.  I sobbed for a good part of that hour, basking in the warmth of those thoughts.  I came to a different understanding of my relationship with my mother, even though I was entirely alone. Loneliness offers the opportunity to explore how our relationships continue to animate us, even when we are apart from others.  As Jacques Derrida once said, absence is its own form presence.

 The exploration of loneliness can only happen if we are willing to allow ourselves to feel its effects, even just for a little bit.  If we refuse to feel lonely, we miss out on the unique, melancholic beauty it offers.  The urge to dial the phone, to dive into a social media feed, can squander the possibilities offered by a spacious solitude.  The ingrained urge to socialize can be another form of dependency, whereby we cleave to others not out of an authentic care for others, but out of an inability to abide our present experience.

 Loneliness is merely one note within the key of solitude.  There are many other notes, including freedom, creativity, reflection and insight.  The pandemic has relegated many of us to our homes, but it need not condemn us to the claustrophobia of distraction.  Every moment of isolation can be an invitation to return to attention, to awareness of the irreducible now, to the irrepressible quality of being alive.

[1] Alice Koller, The Stations of Solitude (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 5.

[2] William Wolf, Thoreau: Mystic, Prophet, Ecologist (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1974), 117.

2 thoughts on “Solitude, Part One: Living Well Alone”

  1. Sheila Harrington

    lovely – yes solitude can be a beautiful thing, once we surrender to it. It is always our resistance to something that is painful.

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