In a time where every minute of every day is filled with chatter and noise, solitude and silence do seem like an endearing thing. And while silence and solitude are bound to connect us much more deeply to ourselves and the things that haunt us, work on us, make us laugh or cry, they – just as anything else – can be the most oppressive and terrible things.
Being alone, lonely… maybe it’s for that reason that these expressions have become tinged with the sense of something negative. Or maybe it’s just our society that is suggesting that the more people you have around you that keep you from being alone, the more successful, more cherished, loved and popular you are. After all, who actually likes to be alone? Isn’t it rather the mark of a socially inept person to be alone, to seek loneliness, to find silence?
Another tradition runs against this. In it men and women have chosen solitude and silence as a way to holiness. For it is in the silence and solitude that we hear our inner selves proclaimed. It is in these lonely hours between the waking and the morning that we truly have to accept our own limits, our own fear and our own hardships that do not come from the world that surrounds us, but from the world that lives in us. But if holiness is found in solitude, why do we shy away from it?
Getting to know oneself is the challenge of a lifetime and some say that you can never achieve it until you’ve drawn your last breath. Be that as it may, it still is a hard task for sure. There never is a moment where we do not either surprise ourselves or are scared by our own darkness, meanness and gratious hardness towards either ourselves or the people that depend on us. Listening, hearing and accepting those limitations of our own being, of ultimately what makes us be the humans that we are… will break us or make us.
And thus solitude becomes a catalyst, a primer, a moment of hesitations before we launch ourselves back at the world to change it.
This is a tease post in a series of short essays or meditations that will sooner or later be published alongside with my poetry.
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It sounds like a very pregnant article. I found myself thinking of all sorts of places to go with it. The Solitude and loneliness really draw me emotionally for some reason. The whole ting though seems to offer a hope. I’m very interested after this tease where your thoughts may go.