In the twenty-first century, solitude is a luxury of the past. We are constantly intruded upon by obligations—work, chores, family, social commitments—and by noise and pollution. It has come to the point that many people have lost the ability to just be. These people feel at loose ends if they are “not doing.” Alone and unoccupied, they feel uncomfortable, somehow isolated, lost.
In an attempt to protect ourselves from this onslaught of external demands and intrusions, we distract ourselves by literally plugging ourselves into mechanical gadgets, like background radio or TV, the MP3s plugged into the runner’s ear, and so on. These devices do indeed create some sort of buffer zone in which we try to catch our metaphorical breath. But they also create an illusion of being with, of not being alone, and so they further distract us from ourselves.
In fact, many people have lost the sense of the value of solitude. They are afraid of being by themselves, that is, of being alone with oneself. For many, solitude has become an unfamiliar state, often confused with loneliness. As such, it has acquired a sting of inadequacy: to be alone has come to mean that one is a social failure.
Yet solitude never means being lonely. It never means isolation.
On the contrary, knowing how to be alone with oneself is the essential foundation for full connectedness. We learn to connect with our world first by learning to receive that world’s impressions on our senses: the sights, sounds, smells, and movements that draw our attention to what is going on around us. With our attention focused, our survival brain automatically begins to identify and assess the new input. It organizes these sensuous signals into meaningful gestalts of real-life situations. It tells us how to feel about them, and what to do: run, fight, explore, engage, enjoy, and so on.
As we grow more tuned-in to ourselves, we learn to pay attention to the internal dialogue between our survival brain and our cognitive brain, the dialogue between the world and our interpretation of it. The first steps in this development take place almost without our becoming aware of it. Somehow, we start to put things into words, which, in time, allows us to reconsider our “first takes” on the world around us. To reconsider, we need words. It is not an accident that children, having acquired enough language to ask for what they want, use their new skill to pester their elders with endless series of “whys.” What they want now is to make sense of the world around them. When we ask why, we are reaching for meaning. This next development in sense-making is implicit in the reflection, “but if so, then …” When the child begins to think along those lines, he or she is following the trail of causal and logical connections. The child is now moving toward reflective consciousness.
How far this development will go in a person depends on how consistently that person sustains the sense-making effort. Some people are content to stop at the degree of familiarity with their world that allows them to feel safe in it, and to get by. Stopping at this level is what isolates people. Without active access to meaning, the individual feels alienated from his or her world, disconnected except through activity. The getting-by level leaves the person on the surface of life, and of relationships. At this level, it is likely that the person assumes that what makes sense to him or her is true for everyone else, and that any deviation from his or her view of things is “weird.”
Others feel the need to pursue a deeper understanding, which allows us to appreciate that although there are universal human meanings, their manifestations take disparate forms that are deeply influenced by one’s native culture. Tolerance and open-mindedness depend on this deeper sense of reality as does our ability to periodically take a look at our own standards and values, making sure they still make sense for us in the context of our current reality.
The universal need for meaning is a manifestation of the soul, however one chooses to define it. That definition, again, is culturally determined. Solitude is the space in which the soul is born and has a chance to grow. Solitude is never isolation. It is intrinsically connection, interaction between self and other. But it takes time alone to register, identify, savor, reflect upon, make sense of, and appreciate the connections of our personal transient experience to external reality, and to universal human meanings.
Given this function of distilling world-exposure into recognition and meaning, we give up solitude at our own cost. Every time we rush into distractions, we disrupt our connections with our inner world and with our environment, both natural and human. We impoverish ourselves. In fact, we keep life at arm’s length.
Yet the fruit of solitude, comfort with being alone, yields an unexpected benefit that can work for us in the midst of bustle and activity. This benefit is simply a habit of mind, the habit of remaining present to ourselves in whatever we do. This habit of mind protects us, in the midst of distractions, from mindlessness, from just doing, from disconnection. For instance, if some of the time on your run you choose to listen to the birds, while at other times you make a conscious choice to listen to your music player, you are on the way to mindfulness.
What you choose matters only so far as it is an accurate match for an inner state you have acknowledged and identified, and you choose to act upon. The danger is not in choosing one thing versus another; rather the danger lies in falling into automatisms, into the rut of mindless reactions.
Dr. Francesca von Broembsen is a psychologist in private practice in Concord. She specializes in self-development and life coaching. Readers can ask her a question for a later column by sending an email to features@harvardpress.com.