23 Jan Indulging in solitude is certainly selfish, but I do not think it is egotistical. (DANIEL KLEIN)
Language has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich, Theologian (1886 – 1965)
As much as i cherish the joys of genuine companionship, I do love the glory of solitude. This is a pleasure that has deepened for me with age. Often, solitude can fill me with peacefulness and a simple gratitude for being alive.
Sitting alone in the back of our little house on a summer’s day, a field of long grass and wildflowers before me, I revel in the mere act of breathing in and breathing out.
On her trips to the vegetable garden, my wife sometimes offers me an amused smile as she passes by. Once, a few years ago, she asked me if I was thinking deep thoughts out there in my chair. I happily confessed the truth: I didn’t have a single thought in my head, deep or shallow. That was a substantial part of what made it so delightful.
Indulging in solitude is certainly selfish, but I do not think it is egotistical. I don’t sit there congratulating myself on being me. If I congratulate myself about anything, it is on just being. It is a treat to be able to appreciate simply being alive and usually that treat is not available when I am in the company of others. It tends to get lost in the crowd.
Nonetheless, I am not so sold on solitude as was Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher who spent months on end alone on Walden Pond. He, apparently, did have deep thoughts deep in the woods. Wrote Thoreau: “I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
No, I value my time with good friends too much to go that far. But Thoreau does get me thinking about an activity that lies between solitude and time spent with a truly companionable friend, and that is time spent with people when intimacy is not an option. There is a lot of that in our lives—for example, a party, the kind where people flit from group to group and schmooze amiably, often entertainingly, but not really personally. At such gatherings, it is nearly impossible to feel even an intimation of intimacy.
I prefer solitude to that. This may well be an old man thing that comes from a sense of time running out and not wanting to waste a moment of it. I would rather spend my remaining time breathing in and out in my chair behind the house than spend it being the life of a party.
I have noticed that as Snookers gets older, he tends to spend more time alone, too. Rather than go for a walk with me, he often prefers to remain lying beneath a spreading maple tree with his head held up, sniffing the passing scene, occasionally wagging his tail, perhaps in response to an intriguing smell.
Does this mean that in our old age, Snookers and I are withdrawing from the world?
Letting go of the activities and encounters that once enriched our lives so that we can now encounters that once enriched our lives so that we can now pass gracefully to a world of nothingness? I don’t know.
But I do know that sitting alone out in the backyard my life can feel very rich indeed.
Albert Einstein expressed this late-in-life phenomenon beautifully when he wrote, “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It
Daniel Klein
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