The Practice of Solitude

Being alone without being lonely

Category: The Inner Life

This booklet is about being alone. Not loneliness. Not isolation. Not the painful kind of aloneness that feels like exile. The other kind. The deliberate kind. The chosen kind. Solitude. Solitude is different from loneliness. Loneliness is wanting connection and not having it. Solitude is choosing to be with yourself.

How You Experience Alone

Right now, being alone probably feels uncomfortable. Maybe intensely uncomfortable. The moment you’re alone, you reach for something. Your phone. The TV. Music. Podcasts. Anything to fill the silence. The reaching is automatic. Unconscious. Necessary. The silence is loud. Paradoxically. When there’s no external noise, the internal noise gets louder.

What You’re Avoiding

You’re avoiding yourself. Your thoughts. Your feelings. Your unprocessed experiences. Being alone means being with all of it. No distraction. No escape. No buffer. The fullness of your internal experience. The prospect is overwhelming. So you avoid. Stay busy. Stay connected. Stay away from yourself.

Loneliness vs. Solitude

Loneliness is pain. Ache. Absence. You want connection and don’t have it. Solitude is peace. Presence. Sufficiency. You’re alone and it’s enough. You’re with yourself and it’s okay. Loneliness happens to you. Solitude is chosen. Deliberately. Voluntarily. The choice is essential. Changes everything. Transforms alone from punishment to gift.

Good Company

When Things Fall Apart — Pema Chödrön, 1997
Chödrön was a schoolteacher whose husband came home and told her he was having an affair. She became a Buddhist nun. This book is about sitting with the groundlessness, the free fall that comes when the life you expected disintegrates and nothing has arrived to replace it. She doesn’t offer comfort. She offers something harder: the suggestion that the falling itself is where the learning lives. Short chapters. Each one a small act of courage.
Manchester by the Sea — Kenneth Lonergan, 2016
Casey Affleck plays a man who cannot recover from what happened to him. The film never asks him to. He doesn’t heal. Doesn’t transform. Doesn’t deliver a speech about growth. He just keeps going, doing the next thing, carrying the weight without putting it down. Lonergan made a film that respects the grief that doesn’t resolve, that simply becomes the shape of a life. The most honest film about loss that doesn’t insult you with a tidy ending.
Skeleton Tree — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, 2016
Cave’s fifteen-year-old son died during the recording of this album. You can hear the exact point where the songs stop being about anything else. The music doesn’t dramatise the loss. It just continues, fractured, sparse, present, the way a person continues when the worst thing has already happened. It’s not cathartic. It’s not redemptive. It’s the sound of someone still here, still making, still breathing. That turns out to be enough.