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I want to
know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
Tell me about a moment of real solitude, a moment when you
were with yourself and felt yourself at the center, a
moment when you could feel the world, the stars, the
galaxies spinning around you.
In the spring of 1974, I took the train home at the end of
our college term. There was one train a day that
left Toronto in the early evening and arrived in my
hometown, four hundred miles north, at 4:30 in the
morning. No one I knew was coming, so there was no
one to meet me at the station. The only person to
get off the train, I stood for a moment on the wooden
platform and then swung my knapsack onto my back and
started to walk toward home. My family lived on the
opposite side of town, about a mile and a half away.
It was dark when I started walking, but by the time I'd
reached the bridge that spanned the river in the center of
town, walking past stores and restaurants and the town's
single traffic light, dutifully changing color although
there was not a car in sight, the sky was streaked with
the pink-gold of dawn, and the birds were singing the sun
up.
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It's the quiet I remember most, the sweet stillness of the
whole town sleeping. I was nineteen--in blue jeans,
denim jacket, and a yellow T-shirt, with long, straight,
blonde hair.
I inhaled a great
gulp of the cool spring air and found myself smiling for no apparent
reason. I suddenly realized that no one knew where I
was. And yet I was there, close to so many who knew me.
Walking down the center of the deserted streets, past the familiar
houses, I felt invisible--seeing and yet not being seen, by
choice. For the first time in my life I felt truly alone and
completely with myself. I imagined the people I knew in those
houses--sleeping, dreaming, waking to the growing light and rolling
over to find one more hour of sleep--unaware that someone was
walking past, observing their lives in motion. . . .
It was as if I had stepped outside something of which I had always,
unconsciously, been a part and was seeing it for the first
time--this stream of life, this cycle of ordinary living that goes
on within and around us all the time. I knew that in that
moment, when I went through my parents' door, I would become a part
of it again and lose this acute sense of being the witness, alone
and completely with myself and my own thoughts. I knew I would
be swept up in the hugs and exclamations of surprise and greeting,
the sharing of news and the sounds and smells of bacon and eggs and
coffee--the irresistible tide of living in the world. But for
this moment, I was with the world, watching it but somehow not in
it. I was alone with myself. . . .
Tell me, have you met yourself? Have you been able to step
outside the business of life for just one moment and look in from
the outside, feeling yourself whole and separate and yet with the
world?
There is a tension in living fully, what often feels like an
opposition between our longing for the solitude where we can find
our own company and the desire to be fully and intimately with the
world. When we learn to live with both the desire for
separation and the longing for union, we find that they are simply
two ways of knowing the same ache: we all just want to go
home.
Some days, solitude is an impossibility. Caught up in the
activities of daily living, I ache for my own company and am filled
with a sorrow that makes me weep when I cannot find it.
And, at other times, I do too much and run too fast deliberately,
unconsciously hoping to avoid the cool and steady gaze of that young
woman standing on the patio, the gaze that sees clearly what is
within and around me. Sometimes I don't like what she sees,
don't like the company I keep when I am with myself, and want to
pull away from this woman I am. So I fill the empty moments
with TV, or work, or a book, or time with another. It takes
courage to be willing to meet myself over and over again, seeing in
my own face more beauty and grace and ability to love than I had
feared. I forget that it does not matter how far or how fast I
move, but only how much of myself I take along for the journey.
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