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| Source: twitter.com |
‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the once popular
ad. Today, its haunting ambiguity lingers on, inviting reflection on the
sociality of the human condition, or the lack of it. Can we, or should we, seek
to be alone? Does being alone invariably mean we are lonely? Or is being alone
our natural state? After all, we are born alone and we ultimately die alone. In
the moment of death we return to that primal moment of separation from whatever
it is that we have come from, both physical and spiritual. The last sound we
make in this life will be an echo of the primal cry of birth, a cry of protest
shaped by desire for something left behind, for some other being. We protest in
the face of our aloneness in death as in birth.
To be alone is not necessarily to be lonely, although it
is often thought of in that way. To be truly alone is to embrace solitude.
Solitude is necessary for human health whereas loneliness destroys the human
spirit.
To experience loneliness, a person needs to have known
what it is to be left to themselves before they have come to know their true
self, as can happen with rejection in childhood. The abandoned child will have
left a great part of themselves in the place from which they have been banished
and perhaps with the person who has rejected them. Bereavement in early
childhood can also be felt as abandonment or rejection, leaving that person
feeling inwardly naked and often angry. Lonely
people are vulnerable because they go through life in a state of inner
nakedness – as naked souls, perhaps.
Loneliness is never chosen. But solitude must be chosen
and then learned. It is a free choice. Unlike loneliness, it does not impose
itself and it never cheats those who embrace it. It never cheats them of the
joy it promises. It is always its own reward.
Making the jump from aloneness, and the loneliness
associated with it, to the kind of solitude in which life gestates and yields
creativity in the true sense of the word is not something achieved through will
power. Neither can we try to effect solitude, because we are curious to know
what it is like to experience some sort of higher spiritual state. Solitude is
not about being in a higher state. It is about acceptance of the present moment
in the full knowledge that it is as it is, and in the expectation that it is
also something deeper and greater. Solitude allows the moment to be inhabited
by Love itself, a Love which re-clothes us in the nakedness of our loneliness.
Since solitude is not chosen and yet never fails to
deliver what it promises, it is essential that a person simultaneously seeks
and waits for solitude to come to them, that they wait for it to happen. This
is a question of disponibilité, to
borrow from the French philosopher Simone Weil. To be disponible is to be fully available, permanently ‘on call’ to the
one who promises. It is a state of mind and heart which can take a lifetime to
reach, especially if a person has experienced real loneliness and depression. For
one thing, someone who has known the kind of loneliness which comes with emotional
banishment is often distrustful of what might seem to be a ‘self help’ method
for depression, especially if there is a religious tinge to it. They do not trust
religion or its methods. Depression is, among other things, an acute state of
vulnerability and abandonment, possibly including a sense of having been
abandoned by God.
Re-generative and transforming solitude does not come about
through self-enforced loneliness, in the belief that we are dealing with our
depression without the need for outside help. It comes about as a gift in its
own right. It is the antidote to the causes of depression, although it will not
cure depression itself. Depression, we are learning, is a chemical disorder as
much as an emotional one and needs to be treated accordingly.
The gift which comes with solitude simply makes it
possible for the one suffering from depression, and the loneliness it brings, to
step outside that particular state of mind and view it objectively as something
other than themselves. Their true self remains inviolate waiting for the gift
which solitude brings. So solitude involves being available to having something
given to us which is both unconditional and life-transforming.
Solitude changes
the way we see things and people. It places them within a wider framework, one
which can usefully be seen as having been constructed around them, like a
picture surrounded by a frame. This conceptual framework contains us, and our
situation in regard to them, as it would a painting. It allows us to see things
as they are in the general scheme of things. When we see a person in that ordered
context it sometimes becomes possible to meet them in a new and different way
and hence to forgive them if we need to.
People who have
hurt us are not integral to who we are. Neither are they part of our
loneliness. They exist on their own. They have their particular pain and responsibilities
in regard to themselves and others. The gift which comes with solitude makes it
possible for us to see such people objectively, and eventually to forgive them without
feeling that in so doing we have allowed them to expose us once again in our
naked vulnerability.
Instead, we are vulnerable to Love itself, which is not
the same thing as saying that we become prey to our emotions, seeing ourselves
and others through the mist of our own indulgent tears. The riches of solitude
are the riches of Love incarnate, love which is flesh of our flesh and bone of
our bone, hard, tough and resilient. It is love as we see and know it in the
person of Jesus Christ.
