My father died suddenly during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. The loss unhinged me. Even though I lived with two roommates and was surrounded by fellow students and teachers, I spent the next three years of college in a fog of depression and isolation. After graduation I joined the Peace Corps, partly in order to avoid the draft—it was the height of the Vietnam War—and partly from having no idea where I wanted to go with my life.
Arriving in East Africa as a minimally prepared secondary-school teacher, I experienced being completely alone in a culture totally different from the one I’d grown up in. Paradoxically, instead of miring me in loneliness, being in this utterly new and different environment drew me out of my isolation. After a few weeks there, I woke up with a sense of shock to the realization that the way people were living in this part of the world—still organized in traditional tribal societies and cultivating and hunting their own food—was far more representative of how human beings had lived for thousands of years than the lifestyle I’d come from. American culture by contrast seemed like an artificial, self-involved, materialistic aberration.
This refreshing experience of solitude gave me the space to find myself, my own values, a sense of purpose. I enacted this new direction primarily in teaching young people who were the first in their families to receive a Western-style education, but also through organizing an anti-war protest among my fellow Peace Corps volunteers in Kenya. It was a formative time that, along with encountering Buddhism shortly after my return to the States, set the course for the rest of my life. Ever since that time, I’ve appreciated solitude, and contemplated its relationship to its close cousins: isolation, loneliness, and aloneness. Making peace with time alone and finding the means to do it in the healthiest way may be essential to living life well.
Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau’s celebration of solitude has itself been celebrated widely ever since. Yet, between 1825 (when Thoreau was eight years old) and 2000, use of the word “solitude” in printed books declined by over 70%. In the same period, use of the word “loneliness” increased by over 500%.
What may this curious statistic be revealing?
It suggests, perhaps, that we are living in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness accompanied by a famine of solitude, increasingly isolated from each other and yet starved for the kind of time alone that rewards us—and those who come in contact with us—deeply.
Both loneliness and solitude are conditions of aloneness—which simply describes the state of being by yourself and doesn’t carry a positive or negative connotation—but the actual experiences the two words evoke are very different. Loneliness involves feelings of sadness and yearning for what is absent: family, friends, home, native land, culture. This yearning for people and places that hold great meaning for us expresses a basic human need to belong—to be in active relationship with the things that make us who we are. Loneliness is an instinctive response to feelings of social isolation, moving us to seek and reach out to others. But at times this seeking and reaching behavior can turn into grasping and clinging. Becoming fixated on what we think is missing in our lives can itself become an obstacle to getting our needs for belonging and intimacy met.
Solitude, on the other hand, is time we choose to spend alone in a special way. It’s not just taking time for yourself. It’s not merely R&R, as important as that is in the midst of the over-pressured lives many of us lead these days. Rather than taking time for ourselves, genuine solitude is about taking time with ourselves: time devoted to cultivating a deeper, more intimate, and more authentic relationship with ourselves.
We become who we are in relationships. The very sense of being a self—a “me” who is different from “you” and “them”—develops through an infant’s attachment relationship to their mother, whose voice and smiles and reactions teach it that it possesses agency, the ability to cause things to happen outside of itself.
As social animals, we live in a mesh of relationships. Much of what’s most important and meaningful for us is mediated by our relationships with others. At the same time, these vital relationships also constrain us. Naturally, there are times when these constraints are socially beneficial, such as when a friend or lover is able to interrupt a damaging habit we’ve fallen into. At other times, though, the tangle of relationships can constrain us in a way that suppresses essential aspects of our nature and limits our potential for growth and change and self-realization. We can get trapped inside a version of who we are expected to be that is out of touch with who we are.
As we grow from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, eventually our most fundamental relationship becomes the inner relationship with ourselves. This relationship is not always easy or comfortable, but it is through consciously recognizing and taking responsibility for our feelings and needs and desires, rather than seeking solutions from others or blaming them for our problems, that we develop inner strength. That inner relationship can be fostered in solitude, which can provide us a kind of strength that can counteract the frequent demands to be shaped by others’ agendas to the exclusion of our own deepest aspirations.
In solitude, the relatedness of our lives doesn’t go away, but its demands become less immediate, giving us the opportunity to check in with feelings and values at a deeper level, to experience a positive quality of aloneness (including perhaps some pangs of loneliness). In this deeper engagement with ourselves, our sense of identity and self-worth becomes less dependent on input and affirmation from others.
As we learn to be less psychologically and emotionally dependent—and our sense of who we are matures—we find greater freedom in how we experience and interact with others
As we learn to be less psychologically and emotionally dependent—and our sense of who we are matures—we find greater freedom in how we experience and interact with others. As our own need lessens we are more able to see others as they are, whether for better or for worse, and more able to genuinely give of ourselves to support and benefit other people—certainly those who are closest and most important to us, but also those with whom our relationships may be less deep or lasting.
While aloneness does sometimes involve feelings of loneliness, in a positive sense it represents our ability to stand on our own two feet, to function autonomously, to not be constrained by unhealthy dependence on others. It is a state of being “self-possessed.” Excessive time alone, of course, is unhealthy for most people. It can lead to psychological breakdown (as the movement to eliminate solitary confinement in our prison systems attests). But insufficient time alone, like an unbalanced diet, deprives us of essential nutrients for living a whole and rewarding life.
Practicing mindfulness can greatly enhance the benefits of solitude. Since it is about paying attention to whatever is occurring in the present moment, mindfulness practice allows the background clutter of thoughts and fantasies to subside and the clear, calm, and spacious innate nature of the mind to appear. At the same time, mindfulness is about cultivating a life-enhancing inner relationship between whatever arises in our experience and our simultaneous awareness of its arising. This special quality of awareness is sometimes referred to as “witness consciousness.”
As the mind settles and becomes more clear and focused, awareness grows both deeper and broader. We start to notice what is going on below the level of our everyday discu