Where is Alonetime?
When listening to patients talk about their lovers, family, or friends, I am struck by their expressions of gratitude if they receive "time off" to engage in their own pursuits. Like prisoners who are granted parole before they deserve it, they feel that their freedom is a gracious gift. Therefore, they have a hard time ever suggesting the possibility of spending a relaxing day alone.
Perhaps our biggest mistake is the way we view solitude. Just as the need and love for food is satisfied in many ways—a gourmet meal, snack, cooking lessons, grazing, or a barbecue—alonetime can be found while with another, in crowds, in sleep, or in alert and chosen isolation. It does not even require quiet and stillness. Alonetime can be found in a roomful of people dancing, in prayer, in nature, in the creative act, at the computer, or with your mate. In a country retreat, I listened to the rain and watched it pour down on a skylight as I reflected on wilderness and its connection to being alone. Nearby, my husband was reading Moby-Dick. Yet, of course, we were both experiencing a form of alonetime. You can be alone with people, as my husband proved by showing me a passage from Melville: "[Queequeg] was a man some 20,000 miles from home… thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companions: always equal to himself."
Alone in Nature
One way alonetime is fueled is by experiences that put us in contact with nature. The "tonic of wilderness," as Thoreau called it, is a theme that still resounds today. In 1993, Borge Ousland, a Norwegian explorer, made one of the most difficult treks in polar history. Pulling a 300-pound sled, he skied alone to the North Pole over more than 600 miles of drifting ice. Once or twice a week he communicated with his base camp by radio. After his extraordinary solo trek of 52 days, he said, "I had feared I would be lonely; I had never spent so much as a single night alone in a tent before... But being alone proved to be one of the greatest experiences of the entire trek."
Throughout history, we see individuals who have tired of the confines of civilization and voiced a longing for free space. Tidal pools, empty fields, mountains, trees, and oceans evoke peace and contentment. Something sacred fills these open spaces. I believe we long for "places with no roads...but plenty of space" from the time we are children. When he was less than two years old, my grandson Benjamin, riding on the Metro in Washington. D.C., opened his hands as if reading a book. "I'm in the ocean," he said, describing the imaginary book. "I'm swimming with the dolphins."
Unfortunately, for the sake of necessity and convenience, most of us must learn to locate the solitary contentment of being alone in nature in our everyday lives. The other day, I walked alone in Bartholomew's Cobble, a historical nature preserve in Massachusetts, several miles from my house. Small caves in the Cobble may have been used from time to time as temporary shelters by nomadic Indians. I found a rock in one of the caves to sit on, from which I watched a stream, and later lay down on a flatland that was equally quiet, enjoying the empty moments and feelings of awe.
Solitude & God
During an excursion to the Monasterio de Santa Maria de Pedralbes in Spain, I entered the large and mostly undecorated main sanctuary and was stunned by the quiet. How does the search for God overlap with the search for solitude? Religion must provide time for prayer and meditation. And the relationship of the individual to God is one solution to the paradox of aloneness and relatedness.
The life of the ancient solitary monk has much to convey to us about needs for alonetime and social engagement. Both monastery and monk stem from the same Greek word, meaning "alone" or "single." Interestingly, the word "convent" comes from the Latin convenire, which means to meet together. The origins of these two words, monastery and convent, poetically combine the two basic human needs to be alone and to be together.
Contemplation is often described as the preferred mode for achieving spiritual peace, which is why journeys on the way to truth or salvation are undertaken alone. Religious pilgrimages in the old sense still occur today, but they are briefer; we even see in people's recreational walks and runs attempts to escape the hectic pace of life and rid the mind of excess. These sojourns, of course, do not equal the many-month hikes of ancient times. But Buddhists continue to live in a state of pilgrimage, because they view life as a series of present moments that call us to a state of non-attachment and yet, at the same time, unity with God.
For religion to have its greatest appeal, it must allow time for solitude. The book of Genesis lays this foundation. Within the creation story, God established Saturday, the Shabbat, as a day of rest, set aside from all others. The Shabbat was a time to contemplate one's life and the scriptures. We can do the same, whether we take a day of rest for ourselves, or an hour of quiet prayer, or even a few minutes of meditation. Whether in a remote, faraway stillness or in the very center of a community, the hermit or itinerant monk resides in us all.
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