Solitary Time
“Times
of solitude help me come back to the primary reality—to actual,
felt experience, and then, eventually, to a more reasoned and
balanced perspective on that experience.”
Vajragupta
(“The Return Journey,” Parabola, Fall 2018, p. 57)
A friend of mine just
returned from six days in the Shenandoah Valley. She spent that time
alone in a camper, but at a campground where other people were
staying. Her purpose was to carve out some solitary time to meditate
deeply on the next stage of her life. Even if you live alone, it's
hard to dedicate time for such inner activities. There are so many
distractions when we're at home—everyday necessities take time, as
does responding to every sort of media message. It's just too easy to
fall into the regular patterns and demands of social connections.
Solitude is the opposite of that. It is unstructured time in a quiet
environment, alone with one's thoughts, in liminal time and space.
One learns to rise and fall with the circadian rhythms of the
environment rather than by a clock. Our brainwaves and heart beats
synchronize with the music of cicadas and crickets. Far from
frightening, solitude is restorative.
Reentry, however, is
sometimes difficult. If we stay in solitude long enough, we slow down
to the rhythm of nature. When we have to come back to everyday life,
we realize how sped-up everything is. The pace of life is always
hectic; people are in a rush, even when they've nowhere in particular
to go. Traffic is snarled, people run red-lights, honk horns, and
holler obscenities—and that is just our morning commute. We may
feel a little raw and sensitive, like our skin has relaxed too much
to protect us from the normal assault.
Take heart! It is far
better to grab opportunities for solitude than not, even if coming
back is challenging. We must know how “peaceful” actually feels
before we can seek it out. With practice, we carry some of it back to
the hubbub we call “normal” and sometimes, if we're lucky, we can
hold on to it until our next opportunity to high-tail it into the
wilderness. We realize that we feel more balanced, less angry. Once
our body/mind gets a dose of quietude, it yearns for more. Before we
know it, solitude feels “normal” and all that amped-up energy
seems, well...just a little bit crazy. And so it is.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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