I love people. I love my family, my children... but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
— Pearl Buck
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
— Henry David Thoreau
Solitude is an opportunity to renew ourselves. In other words, it replenishes us. We all need periods of solitude, although temperamentally we probably differ in the amount of solitude we need. Some solitude is essential; it gives us time to explore and know ourselves. It is the necessary counterpoint to intimacy, what allows us to have a self worthy of sharing. Solitude gives us a chance to regain perspective. It renews us for the challenges of life. It allows us to get back into the position of driving our own lives, rather than having them run by schedules and demands from without. Indeed, solitude actually allows us to connect to others in a far richer way.
Solitude is an important route to creativity. Indeed, research on creative and talented teenagers suggests that the most talented youngsters are those who treasure their solitude. However, the artist in all of us must risk disconnection, for forging a happy and worthwhile life — and navigating through that life fully and gracefully — is itself a creative act. Solitude enables us to enter the realm of silence. Silence is the universal matrix, the emptiness that makes fullness possible. When we enter silence, we enter the emptiness wherein the distinction between self and other, while not obliterated, is transcended. We enter a new mode of experience, one that does not divide subject from object and is therefore, open to authentic love, to our sharing in each other’s subjectivity.
Silence opens us to love. Silence is the still, small voice of God. It is the voice of the inward teacher, wordlessly inviting us to open ourselves, to be centered in the oneness of mind and heart, self and other, in which we live. The universe unfolds upon a background of living silence. To enter that sustaining silence is to go behind the appearance of things, to understand the secret of divine artistry, to be invited to join in the work of creation. It is to dwell in interstitial space in the emptiness between. To dwell in the emptiness is to be like God, everywhere and nowhere.
The longest journey, wrote Dag Hammarskjold, is the journey inward. It is a quest that drives us to search within our souls for the light that will enhance our lives. During our lifetime, we traverse in pursuit of a spiritual quest hoping that it will change or affect our lives. Each of our experiences should inspire us to continue this sublime quest. It is a seed planted in a garden. It is watered, nurtured and grown under the golden rays of the sun. It flourishes and bears its fruit. In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse writes, “Within you, there is stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.”
