solitude

A few years ago, I thought I wanted to be with someone, but his answer was no. I know that’s common, but his reason stuck with me, one word: solitude. It took a few minutes to find that word, but when he did, he knew that was it. Solitude. As a generally extroverted person, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to be alone?

It’s taken me until recently to understand.

We were on a hike, some friends & me, and as usual, I lagged behind. About six miles in (the tail end of a loop trail), I realized that I didn’t mind hanging back. I soaked in the shade of the Redwoods and breathed in the green. I could see no one ahead of me on the trail, no one behind. With the quiet of the woods around me, I kept going at my pace. To me, hikes aren’t the time for timing to beat a personal best.

After being consumed by the regular chaos of city living, I realized that one moment was what I longed for: to be truly alone. (I admit, it was weird at first to hike without my dog, but honestly, do you know what it feels like to be truly alone?)

Sometimes it’s easy to feel alone when surrounded by people. In the city, you can walk up the street & not talk to anyone (rarely, albeit) and feel like you are the only person alive—the rest of the passersby are part of the surroundings. Have you felt that?

I just wasted about twenty minutes trying to find a single word, but it’s a word that means the realization that every person around you is simultaneously leading their own life with their own emotions, feelings, needs, beliefs. The notion crossed my mind occasionally over the years, but my first memory of it was at a gas station in Utah. It was my biggest solo trip. The man at the pump across from me had deep lines in his face, though he could not have been more than fifty. It suddenly occurred to me that this man had lived 40+ years before this one moment of our lives crossing. Have you ever thought this about your co-workers? Your boss? I think about it at work the most: all of these acquaintances, but we are all human, at our core.

It’s funny to think that we are different. We live off our experiences and become so indulged in our own lives that it’s easy to forget that everyone else’s lives are just as complex. They go to bed at night. They get hungry. They feel sad. Sometimes remembering this is the only way living on the other side of the country from my family makes sense. Life does not stop in Pennsylvania just because I am out here. That’s why it’s always different when I go back; that’s why people call with news: life is still moving, even when I am not there to witness it.

Sometimes the complexity feels like too much. Sometimes I wish it would slow down (how many times have I wished it would go faster?). Sometimes I wish I could go back. But the pace is constant, along with change and intricacy.

I think that’s why we all need moments to be alone. This is my season of understanding solitude.

Solitude can often be confused with prolonged singleness. I’ve mistaken it myself, wondered why I am single, why that person chose to be single. There is a difference. There is a tiny knowing somewhere that solitude is a choice, that even when the opportunity to not be single presents itself, the direction to take is apparent: solitude.

That is where I am. While there are moments of doubting that, there are more reassurances that this is where I am supposed to be. I am grateful to live alone (with the company of my pets).

As I flip through pages of Rilke on solitude in Letters to a Younger Poet, I realize this topic is just beginning. I’ll leave you with these excerpts from Rilke:

“There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy…But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours- that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.”

and

“And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground. People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult. All living things do this, everything in nature grows & defends itself according to its kind and is a distinct creature from out of its own resources, strives to be so at any cost and in the face of all resistance. We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it. To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength, concerted on their solitary, fearful, upward beating hearts, they have to learn to love.”