“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal
I spend a lot of time in my own company – “alone” is what people tend to call it but I’m not alone, I’m there, present and listening. I find that in these periods of self imposed isolation I get nice and introspective; question my thoughts, objectives, feel things. It’s meditative.
Quite often I’ll figure something out about myself that I hadn’t quite realised or I’ll be reviewing recent interactions with someone and understand, to a greater degree, what they meant. I can spend hours just with myself contemplating the past and planning for the future. It’s made me a better person and allowed me to slow down my thinking – I now have breathing room for my thoughts and consider them to a deeper level which has ensured that my actions that follow now come from a more conscious position. But it wasn’t always like this.
I think initially people struggle being only with themselves because they have thoughts that they’re not yet comfortable processing or at least not comfortable processing alone. I’d also wager that they have a tough time getting to sleep at night sober, the external silence of the solitary night turns the internal volume right up. It’s not easy. You have to really be able to sit there and let these thoughts happen and if you’re not ready to listen to them, then that time in solitude will be fucking awful because there’s a conflict happening – your mind is being filled with thoughts, and you want to run away from them but remember that you cannot outrun your thoughts and you’ll carry them with you until you deal with them. I’ve tried to run from thoughts before. Hell I’ve travelled 10s of thousands of miles trying to run from them. It does not work. Those little fuckers are persistent. Socrates writes “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?“ and how annoyingly accurate he is. You need to deal with the thing that drove you to leave in the first place and the best way to determine what that thing is, is to ask yourself. If you sit with yourself, somewhere quiet, it will come to you.
I said “sit” then, but my real method of figuring out how to enjoy solitude and use it to my advantage is to walk. I walk. I walk around parks, random hills, to little lakes, everywhere. It’s delightful. I wander around and I think things; sometimes useful things that I grip onto and explore, and sometimes unhelpful things where I’ll watch and try to determine where they came from. Sometimes in this observing, I’ll notice a little thread I can pull on, a little theme between the lines of a thought, and when I do find these little threads, I start to pull intensely – I’ll analyse, I’ll dig, and hopefully I’ll find something. Then I can determine whether or not the discovery is actionable or just something that I need to move on from by feeling and then accepting. I’m not an expert at this but I have found that in just wandering around by myself and letting my mind roll, a lot of things start to make a little more sense.
Give solitude a chance.
Sumb Luck 