Being Alone

How can we believe ourselves alone when we have our own minds? There has never been a time in life for many of us when being alone wasn’t a pleasure, a delicious happiness. In childhood, we have our families, parents, brothers, sisters, other relatives with whom we are expected to co-exist. We enter school early in life and must participate regularly in an organized melee of sensory overload. Daily life contains a sea of distractions. It seems an imposition, a form of being trapped. While with ourselves alone, we can simply BE. Thoughts can go in and out of our consciousness, sensations experienced and noticed, sounds, barely audible within the din of noise when others are present, can be heard and enjoyed. It is a time for renewal of spirit, refreshing energies, connecting with fire in our souls.

If very still and quiet, one can hear the wind . . . distant sounds of birds, croaking frogs beside a creek. Running water, the rhythm of nature. Nothing is more exquisite than solitude. Reading words written hundreds of years before . . . or writing in our own journals; feeling the continuity of simply being alive and on this planet. Who may have been in this place before us? What were their lives, how did they survive? Silence. State of the gods. Space in which to imagine, think, feel.

Absence of any kind of longing. Everything is here, now. The blazing sun, endless expanse of sky, clouds, stars, an ever-morphing moon. Banks of bright azaleas, cherry and apple blossoms in spring; hot, motionless nights of summer with an oddly comforting, steady drone of buzzing insects; panoramas of blazing orange, red and yellow leaves in autumn; crisply cold, icy whiteness of an early winter morning. Changing seasons offer sensational experiences each and every year, one after another. We come to realize that, far from only being present to view their glorious offerings, we are one with them.

Albert Einstein once observed: “I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” Being alone is radically different from being lonely. Making the most of being with ourselves is truly sublime use of our abilities to stimulate our own imaginations, love our own company, and to understand that when we are alone we are gifted and fortunate.