Category — Life

I’ve been thinking about solitude these past few days because I’ve had the luxury, the gift of being alone. Solitude is being alone without being lonely. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” That Sartre was quite a wit.

There is no sense of deprivation about solitude, no something-is-missing-here ache that won’t go away, no longing. It is not about feeling isolated or being withdrawn or passive. It is about active engagement with oneself and with the natural world.

I love it. And I crave it. And I never cease to learn from it.

It wasn’t all that long ago when solitude meant grabbing 45 minutes for myself while children were otherwise engaged. I should take a hot bath with lighted candles while listening to Enya, I would think. That’s what all the magazines say to do. “Me time,” ya know. But I hate baths (sitting in your own shedding epithelial cells), finding and setting up the candles is a lot of work. And, oh, I hate Enya. So those infrequent moments of glorious solitude were filled with tweezing eyebrows or shaving legs. (Yes, solitude was all about the bathroom…the only lockable door in the house.)

Now, fast forward into my life – and boy do I ever mean fast – and I have the luxury of disappearing to a little house 100 miles from home (friends, family, chores, Yogurt Extreme) and just be. Well, just be after a full day of writing. But still.

Sometimes during those non-work hours, sometimes, but too rarely, I am thoughtless. As in, without thought. As in, just inhabiting the moment. Although there’s no “just” to it, is there? But most times I am doing what I do when I am alone, when I can do whatever I want, when I don’t have to consider what someone else might want or like, when I don’t have to take into account someone else’s habits and foibles, when I can throw open all the windows and create the Arctic in my bedroom, when I can read while I eat and eat what I want (Brussels sprouts roasted with garlic and Walla Walla sweets), when the only laundry I have to fold is my own.

It’s not that I want to live this way all the time. I do love my family. I do enjoy the company of friends. But I do so need this solitary time.

Do you? What do you do when you’re alone and can do anything?

When one door closes, another opens.

Alexander Graham Bell said that.

What a smart guy. Yes, it is now a cliché and, worse yet, a bumpersticker — but that doesn’t make it any less true or any less of an important life lesson. Maybe it is not so much true as believing in it makes it true. Believing in the open door can be empowering. It can change the internal monolog from poor me…I am the victim of the slammed door to lucky me…I get to start a new adventure. And if you believe that and act on that belief, it becomes true. Ah, what a sweet bit of self-administered cognitive behavioral therapy.

But, ask yourself (as I did/ as I do): Why wait? Why wait until one door slams shut before exploring the other doors? Why wait for a bad thing to happen to propel you to make good things happen? Why wait to have change forced upon you when you can choose change? Isn’t it possible (and healthy and fun) to seek challenges rather than be compelled to make them, to move forward out of curiosity and imagination rather than disappointment and desperation, to venture forth not because a door closes behind you, but because you suddenly see so many doors ahead of you?

And…think about it… isn’t this the perfect time to start looking for and opening some of those doors, to walk on through, to see what’s there. First, though, you gotta slam that door behind you. Loudly. Bravely. Con brio.

Listen to the lovely, life-enhancing sound of the purposeful exit.

We are self-healing creatures. And isn’t that kind of a miracle?

I am speaking about everyday miracles: Watching a cut I gave myself last week knit itself together, new skin created, a thin scar appearing, soon to disappear leaving no trace. Watching the bruise on my daughter’s arm turn from red to blue to purple, then fade to green, to yellow, then gone, no trace.

I am speaking about the clichéd but consistently amazing time-heals-all-wounds miracle. I marvel that I once thought I would never ever recover from being dumped by my first fierce love, that the heartache would never ever end. And then it did. Or how I never imagined I would ever awake up without the memory of illness. Until the morning I did.

I am speaking about how we heal from difficult childhoods, bad marriages, toxic relationships, scary diagnoses, financial adversities, creative calamities, assorted disasters and all manner of I-didn’t-see-that-coming, slap-upside-the-head vicissitudes of life that could do us in.

But don’t.

Because we are self-healing creatures. Sometimes the miracle comes unbidden. Sometimes we work very very hard for it. Either way, I’m just taking a moment here to say: Wow.

Or, in the words of Van (the Man) Morrison:

When you hear the music ringin’ in your soul
And you feel it in your heart and it grows and grows
And it comes from the backstreet rock & roll and the healing has begun