Necessary Time and Space

 

Epic Aloneness

“The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.” 

Douglas Coupland

          Roseanne Cash wrote a song called, “Sleeping in Paris,” about the loneliness the creative life demands. One of the lines in it is, “A lonely road is a bodyguard/ if we really want it to be.” She spoke in her TED talk about how important it is for her to have stretches of uninterrupted time in which to write the lyrics to her songs. Creativity is a deeply internal process—one must listen to one’s own intuition and act on its instructions. I have offended more than one person by telling them I’m busy and can’t talk.

          A lot of people in this world deal with loneliness—and not just people who live alone. I know couples in decades-long relationships who report feeling lonely. I believe it’s a symptom, a trigger to let us know that space is required for self-exploration. So much of our time and energy is directed outward. For all our middle years, we are busy providing for our family, our job, our community. There are so many years that we are never alone much less lonely. When kids leave home, when one retires, when a spouse leaves or dies, we find ourselves suddenly alone with 24-hrs a day on our hands. Unstructured time, the very thing we craved most during those busy years, is now an everyday reality. Most of us panic and fill it up with volunteer work, and household projects. Anything to stay busy. But underneath all the busyness, there is a yawning abyss of loneliness, because we have not learned how to entertain ourselves, how to simply be alone with our emptiness.

          The French renaissance philosopher, Michel de Montaigne said, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” I’m inclined to agree. One must shelter time to be productive and creative. For introverts, that’s easy, for extroverts, it’s painful and difficult. So many distractions, so many mundane chores—which is why many writers go away from home to write—sometimes even to another country where they don’t speak the language. John Steinbeck said, “All great and precious things are lonely.” If you want to know yourself, and all the things you are capable of, you must set aside discovery time. It is only in knowing oneself, that we can be fully present in any relationship. Dag Hammarskjold said, “Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.” At the very least, set aside time to discover what your gifts are so you know what you have to give to the world.

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                            Jane