How to Be Alone (School of Life) (11 page)

1. Allow your newborn time for the infantile reverie I discussed earlier in the book. Let him or her just lie in your arms; do not seek emotional engagement, like eye contact, immediately. Enjoy for yourself the peace and warmth of being gazed at by your baby. If you cannot refrain from trying to engage with the child, sing – best of all, wordlessly – rather than talk.

2. Let your toddler play alone sometimes. Do not interfere or make reactive play obligatory. In my experience woods are a very good place to practise elementary solitude. This is because the child can experience herself as unsupervised while you are actually very near. She can vanish behind a tree and believe she is alone, even though she is only a couple of metres away and you can hear every move. Woods are very beautiful and fascinating to small people, while in fact being remarkably safe – there are no real predators, you can hear other people approaching; unlike water, where children really can and do drown, not many bad things actually happen in a wood.

3. Read them stories about children alone, who face real dangers and overcome them. This is the central moral message of classic fairy stories where the hero or heroine, alone and in serious difficulties, turns things to their own advantage by courage and cunning. Many of these stories have endured for hundreds (if not thousands) of years; they must be getting something right. Adults are often scared of frightening their children, but watch a child – they like to be a little frightened, so long as it ends up all right.

4. Remember that it is good for children to be bored sometimes. Children who are not continually provided with stimuli develop more active imaginations, a stronger sense of self-sufficiency and, probably, higher self-esteem.

5. Delay as long as possible giving them their own mobile phone. If there is a practical need on specific occasions, or they are doing something that makes you anxious, then lend them one.

6. Never use isolation (‘go to your room’) as a punishment. They will not be in a mood to use their solitude positively and they will associate being alone with being bad and unhappy. Instead, if you are able to provide them with space of their own, offer them ‘time out’ as a reward.

7. Only interrupt a child engaged in a solitary activity (reading, solitary hobbies, loafing about outside) if you have a clear and specific reason which you can articulate. (‘You have to come in now because it is suppertime’ vs ‘Darling, are you all right out there alone?’)

Our children are not happy. I believe this is because over the last half century we have increasingly monitored, supervised and attended to them, and pampered their supposedly frail egos. The original motivation for this was deeply benign, but the sorry fact is that it is not working. We have an increasing number of children with diagnosable mental-health issues (10 per cent of children between one and sixteen is suffering from a diagnosable mental ‘disorder’ at any given time); we have too many children with pathetically short attention spans; we have profoundly alienated youths, who seem to have remarkably poor judgement and serious issues with personal risk assessment, who do not trust adults and do not choose to engage with them. In 2007, a report from UNICEF ranked the UK bottom in childhood well-being compared to other industrialized nations. In 2009, a survey of sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds by the Prince’s Trust found 1 in 10 believed that ‘life was not worth living’.

Woods are a very good place to practise elementary solitude.

These figures are terribly sad. We are doing something wrong. I am not, of course, suggesting that more solitude for young people would solve all these serious, and indeed tragic, problems instantly, but given the known, beneficial effects of solitude already discussed in this book, it might be worth giving them a chance to try it. For me, two important issues are that solitude in childhood appears to be an almost universal experience of creative people and that children love being frightened in a generally safe context (that is why fairgrounds remain in business).

Children, like grown-ups, need different amounts of direct stimulus, company, social engagement and time alone. Neither you nor they can know which sort of person they are if they cannot ever try out solitude.

8. Respect Difference

Bernard Shaw once said, ‘Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you; they may have very different tastes.’

How much solitude does a person need? There is no real answer to this, because everyone is different. There is a helpful vocabulary for anyone trying to think this through, although recently it has got clogged up a bit – the language of Introversion and Extroversion.

Based on Carl Jung’s 1921 definition of personality ‘traits’, a whole system of analysis has developed around the question of how much solitude people want or need. The suggestion (and there are various ‘explanatory’ theories, ranging from cortical stimulation to childhood expectation and experience) is that there are two distinct types of people, who process stimulation differently. For example, in one set of defining qualities you have statements like:

Extroverts are ‘action’ oriented, while introverts are ‘thought’ oriented.

Extroverts seek ‘breadth’ of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek ‘depth’ of knowledge and influence.

Extroverts prefer more ‘frequent’ interaction, while introverts prefer more ‘substantial’ interaction.

Extroverts recharge their energy by spending time with people, while introverts recharge their energy by spending time alone.

Unfortunately it has proven extremely difficult to create a satisfactory way of testing who is which in any very useful way. This is partly because most people do not have a single consistent style of responding, but are more introverted or extroverted in different contexts or moods, and partly because it has proved nearly impossible to find a testing method which is not heavily culturally biased. ‘Do you enjoy going to parties?’ is based on the Western assumption that there are parties of a particular type to go to, whereas in some countries gathering in groups may not perform the social function of ‘parties’ at all. (For example, going to church, a social gathering that is enjoyable to most of the participants, and often noisy with singing and dancing, may well be a ‘party’ for some individuals or cultures and not for others.)

So some psychologists have claimed that happiness is a matter of possessing three traits: self-esteem, optimism and
extroversion,
and that studies prove that extroverts are happier than introverts. However, these findings have been questioned, because the ‘happiness prompts’ given to the studies’ subjects, such as ‘I like to be with others’ and ‘I’m fun to be with’, only measure happiness among extroverts!

Furthermore, even if extroversion makes people happier, this might be because Western Europeans, and especially Americans, live in an ‘extroverted society’ that rewards extrovert behaviours and rejects introversion. Extroverted societies have been described as validating a ‘culture of personality’, whereas other cultures are ‘cultures of character’ where people are valued for their ‘inner selves and their moral rectitude’. These cultures, such as in Central Europe or Japan, prize introversion. And it transpires that in such cultures introverts report greater happiness than extroverts! This is not as twisted as it looks: it makes people feel happy to be approved of.

There are two social tendencies which further complicate this: the first is the apparent irresistible desire to move these sorts of words from adjectives to nouns. So someone with strongly introverted inclinations becomes ‘an introvert’. This divides and separates people from each other and traps people in boxes. (‘She is a blonde’, ‘he is a homosexual’ and ‘they are disabled’ are other examples where a single characteristic comes to define the person; they may all be true, but they do not describe the fullness and complexity of most individuals.)

The other social tendency that goes with this is the universal difficulty we all have with difference itself: the principle of ‘different but equal’ is almost impossible for people to maintain without effort – once you have created this sort of binary system, almost everyone instinctively gives higher value to one or other of the ‘differences’, usually the one with which they most comfortably associate themselves. There is a nice example of an American church leader urging congregations to appoint pastors who scored high on extroversion tests because ‘of course Jesus was an extrovert’.

Sadly, then, although the idea that introversion and extroversion are both normal variants of behaviour ought to help us accept ourselves and understand others, it does not always have this effect.

Moreover we should not really need a complicated psychological test kit to say something so simple. Individuals are different – and we value difference and individuality rather highly in our present society. We would very properly resent government policies designed to make us all exactly the same, insisting for example that we all wore identical uniforms or listened to the same music. It is reasonable and normal then that people should like different amounts of solitude. Even those people who never want any at all should respect those who do – and vice versa – and indeed, as fellow human beings, try to understand why and appreciate the different values that ought to enrich us as a society. It is interesting, but beyond my brief, to wonder why this is so hard: all of us want to be treated as complex and unique human beings, but simultaneously want everyone to be just like ourselves.

Used carefully and discriminatingly, avoiding the temptation to absolutize the sets of behaviours and understanding the limits of the terms, I do find thinking about these psychological ‘tags’ can be useful. If nothing else, the words can be used to open up conversations about how much solitude, quiet and social withdrawal different individuals need: ‘Do you think of yourself as more extroverted or introverted?’ is quite simply a more interesting and less rude question than ‘Why are you single?’ or ‘Why are you so antisocial?’

And asking people why they like being alone or what they get out of it (and of course listening to their answers) is one very effective way of learning about being alone and enjoying it.

IV. The Joys of Solitude

So now it is time to look more closely at the benefits and indeed the ‘bliss’ of solitude. I am going to turn to the positive claims that have been made for being alone and see if I can persuade you that they are worth pursuing.

Over the centuries during which people have explicitly practised solitude and reflected on their experience (that is, as long as we have had any form of recorded human culture) there have been surprisingly consistent reports of what it might offer those who seek it out. These ‘rewards’ can be grouped into five categories, although they overlap and are certainly not exclusive:

1. A deeper consciousness of oneself.

2. A deeper attunement to nature.

3. A deeper relationship with the transcendent (the numinous, the divine, the spiritual).

4. Increased creativity.

5. An increased sense of freedom.

What seems to me most worth noticing is how widespread, through both time and social arrangements, these experiences are. They are not some mad aberrations of a single, or even a few, heroic or crazed individuals. Very different people, alone for very different reasons and using very wide-ranging images and languages, all say fundamentally similar things. Going by their example, you might try seeking these rewards of solitude yourself.

1. Consciousness of the Self

In his excellent and informative book
From the Holy Mountain
(Flamingo, 1998), William Dalrymple tells a delightful and revealing little story. Dalrymple was staying with a Coptic monk in the Egyptian desert, and he questioned the hermit about his motivation for choosing such an austere lifestyle.

‘Many people think we come to the desert to punish ourselves, because it is hot and dry and difficult to live in,’ said Father Dioscuros. ‘But it’s not true. We come because we love it here.’

‘What is there to love about the desert?’

‘We love the peace … You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere. But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find
yourself
.’

Exactly what this ‘self’ might be remains, of course,
the
continuing philosophical (and psychological and spiritual and intellectual) question. If the self is just ‘me’, how can ‘I’ lose it – or for that matter find it? Nonetheless, over and over again people write of solitude that it allows them to ‘re-gather’ a sense of self that can get ‘scattered’. Oliver Morgan, quoting from Koch’s
Solitude
(see Homework for details), uses the image explicitly: