Bookends of Solitude
Silence and solitude invite us to pause, to slow down and to stop. How rare this is in a culture that revels in continuous motion. We live in a highly extroverted culture in which everything is expressed and exposed at all times of day and night. This has led to a coarsening of our language and a dilution in substance. Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw says that ‘we are addicted to disclosure…’ We need to learn the skills of restraint, of holding close to the heart what needs our utmost attention… We suffer from what I call premature revelation, sharing too much, too soon and with little regard for the shyness of the soul… We must learn to modulate our exposure, allowing things to ripen and mature in the container of the heart before revealing our secret inner flesh to others. In so doing, we will be better able to hear the subtle character and nuanced complexities of our inner life.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow, pps. 91-91
Francis Weller
Solitude grows in a fleshy helix with its counterpart, Loneliness. Both plant different seeds in the soul, both produce their respective nutritious gifts. Loneliness is the reminder of our yearning to belong--the underpinning of that message is to constellate us in a group. We have evolved and thrived as social creatures, and, as such, we need each other. Loneliness exists to nudge us into the arms of those we love.
Solitude is the space you find. My version of deeply fulfilling solitude includes three things:
Non-interruption - any or distraction stimulus that enters my space of solitude is one I have permitted
Quiet - any noise outside of nature that enters my space of solitude is curated
Aesthetic Beauty - achieving 1 and 2 usually puts me in nature, far from civilization, so aesthetic beauty is both a consequence of an essential for achieving non-interruption and quiet
My solitude and loneliness resume is long. Because solitude and loneliness are frequent companions, they can easily be confused for one another, but they are actually quite distinct in how they feed or guide the soul.
I have spent the last 2 decades seeking frequent and intentional solitude, after the first 3 decades of feeling as if it was foisted upon me. There have been moments in my curated solitude when I have felt profoundly lonely as well as moments in my unintended solitude, often traveling, when I felt connected to an exciting world of adventure.
Apparently, when I was pre-ambulatory, I preferred being in a playpen at my babysitter’s house while my mom was at work. My babysitter cared for many children during the day, so her house was hectic with the needs of an unrelenting toddler hoard. There is a picture of me standing in a playpen, satisfied, walled off in my transparent crenelated castle, happy to be separated from the chaos of other children.
I grew up in Midwestern suburbs where friends were at least a car ride away and an older brother whom I did not get along with. There was no one in my neighborhood who matched my age or interests, so I ended up spending a lot of time alone playing as a child--these were times of loneliness that fed a phenomenally creative inner life. When I was six, I would fall asleep having sports competitions with my hands--each finger was an athlete, each hand a team. I remember clasping my hands together and playing at racing my hands or wrestling with them to see who would win.
Fast forward through elementary, junior high and high school where I navigated different friend groups and degrees of social fickleness. Wandering in and out of belonging and edge dwelling, I never had a strong enough group identity to meld with group thinking. In those stretches where I was on the outs with a peer group, I felt lonely as you do when you’re young and wanting so desperately to belong.
In 1991 I was an au pair in Paris. I had no money to spend, no electronic devices, no phone. I was on the 7th floor of a building of flats in a tiny chambre de bonne with a hot plate and a few dishes—no bathroom, no kitchen. Just a room with a small bed, a large armoire and a desk. If there was a poster child moment for solitude, this was it.
Returning from work every night, I arrive at my room on Rue Faubourd St. Honore and drink tea and write in my journal for hours about everything that happened during the day. Inevitably I would reach the moment where there was nothing else to write, so I might lie in my bed and stare at my ceiling or look out my big windows at the city lights.
I dreamed about places I wanted to travel and romances I wanted to have. I got bored. I was intensely lonely. I was also aware of getting to know myself. It was bitterbittersweetsweet—it was one of the worst and best years of my life. Though I’m not compelled to suffer loneliness in the manner I experienced during that year, I am recreating a dilution of the sweet end of that equation every time I go away. That was the first year where I was beginning to evolve an awareness of the distinction between solitude and loneliness.
Solitude has always been a bubble where I have some agency over life’s pause button. Stimulus and circumstances that are overwhelming or unpleasant are given a wide berth in the eye of the hurricane, where I often long to be.
