Comfort in solitude
The pianist Glenn Gould once told: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don’t really know... but it’s a substantial ratio.”
For me at least this has always been true.
Whenever I spend a certain number of hours with friends, or people in general, I have a tendency to withdraw for a certain while. To pull back, to just be silent on my own, to go for a walk or eat something alone, to generally spend some time alone with me and my thoughts.
I used to think this was weird. I used to think it was a weird thing to want to spend time alone. My friends always looked at me weird when I tell them I like going for walks or to the movies by myself. They always look at me like I’m crazy.
But the funny thing is, I see people most often than not having a lot of unnecessary—and sometimes frankly imaginary—issues just because they don’t know how to deal with their own thoughts.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century. And I was seeing this first hand.
I saw this first with my sister when she moved to a different country. She had to live alone for the first time in her life and the biggest problem she had to face was how to deal with all the solitude.
She called me confused and anxious, “Should I move back?” “Should I move in with someone else?” “Should I move to a dorm?”. The only thing I told her was this: “You just don’t know how to spend time alone yet. Learn to find comfort in that solitude and trust me you’ll feel much better even when you’re around people.”
Cultivate a relationship with yourself before you build one with the world, because your relationship with yourself will be the anchor you use to build everything else on. And that anchor is built in the moments you’re alone with yourself and your thoughts. If that foundation is shaky, everything else will fall apart just as easily.
Surrounding yourself with people is a good thing. Especially when they are real people who care for you. But the problem arises up when you are so dependent on other’s for your sanity that you don’t know how to care for yourself.
So go for a walk alone this week, see how that feels. Force yourself to face your own thoughts and lend them a hand of compassion.
With enough time, you’ll learn to find comfort in your solitude. You’ll learn to be comfortable by yourself. Maybe even a little happy. Maybe then you won’t have to have a mental breakdown every time you have to spend a little time without your phone.
Good Luck,
Arshad