Solitary
Play
“Alone,
alone, Oh! We have been warned about solitary vices. Have solitary pleasures
ever been adequately praised? Do Many people know they exist?”
Jessamyn
West
I
remember a time, when I had young children and a husband and a busy work schedule,
and I would have given almost anything to simply have one lone hour to do nothing
at all. One hour of solitude or creativity; one hour to think only about what I
wanted to fill it with—that was as out of reach as Mars. I even remember a time
when a bath was out of the question—at least a bubble bath all by myself with
music and candles—What!
I’ll
bet there are millions of people in America today who are sweating through such times right now. School’s out, no summer camps, kids are bored to death, and you
can’t bear to watch them play video games all day, so you bend your brain
trying to come up with alternatives. As we say down here in the sweltering
South, “Bless your heart, honey. I’ve been there.”
Just
when I feel extra sorry for the young families here who are struggling with too
much family immersion, I think of all the folks around the world who live like
that all the time—in a one or two-room hut, with several generations crowded
inside. I visited with some folks down in Guatemala years ago. Five generations
lived in one space, and I didn’t hear a single complaint. The notion of being
alone never occurred to them. Every minute, from cradle to grave, they were in
the company of family.
According to a 2018 count, fifty percent of
American adults are single, and 32 million of them live alone. That’s 28%, or
one in every seven adults live by themselves. While that seems high to me, it
is typically not a problem because we can come and go as we please, invite
friends over, have dinner out, go to a concert or a movie. We can, in normal
times, get our need for “people time” met. But right now, with the coronavirus
bearing down on us, we are stuck at home and most of the time, we’re alone. What
to do?
In her
book, Simple Abundance, Sarah Ban Breathnach asks the question: “Remember,
once upon a time, when we all knew how to play?” She suggests that we
travel back in time and revisit what we loved to do when we knew how to play. “Nothing
that once made us happy and fulfilled is ever lost,” she says. We just need
to remember and give ourselves permission to play. When I was a kid, I filled
coloring books with bright crayon colors. I drew stuff in the margins of my
notebooks and built little “pixie” communities in the dirt of our back yard. I
read grocery bags full of books from the library. I watched ants (in those days
there were no fire ants) come and go holding things above their heads like
members of a safari caravan. I disturbed their mounds and watched as they
gathered their eggs and hurried to get them sheltered underground. All the
solitary pursuits of childhood are still available to us. We simply must give
ourselves permission to play. It’s not silly, it’s essential to mental health.
While
we are waiting out this time of pandemic isolation, let’s reimagine play. What
does adult play look like to you? Please don’t say eating and drinking, because
we don’t want to come out of this isolation with regrets. But make a list of
all those things that you imagined you would do when there was no way to do
them—and then, well…go do them. There are so many pleasures to be found in
solitude.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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