How to Be Alone (School of Life) (12 page)

I can sense that my ‘person’ is pulling back from its scattering into the details and plans of today, like a wave rolling from sand and shore back to its ocean source – collecting itself into a unity of ‘ocean’. ‘I’ am here, present to myself and available for a possible revelation of what is inside me … I am present too for experiences of those guiding, inner images (personal metaphors, archetypes) that I sense shape my values, actions, judgements and decisions during the rest of the time.

Thomas Merton, from a religious angle, sees this process as morally necessary:

All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain to the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting … If a man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own solitude, he ceases to be a true person.

But you do not need to be so grandiose about this business of knowing the self; it is not just a truth for reflective philosophers or great minds. It can be quite domestic and ordinary. Here my friend Jill Langford describes what joy solitude gives her and how she goes about getting it in a very busy life:

About twenty-five years into my marriage, with seven children, I asked my husband for a one-man tent for Christmas. A little taken aback, perhaps, he nonetheless granted my request and bought me a super little army tent or bivouac shell that you honestly couldn’t squeeze two people into. You erect it, quite easily and quickly, crawl in on your belly, then turn over onto your back, clutching a sleeping bag, raise your knees and wriggle your legs, then bottom, then torso into it. Et voilà. You stay in that position till morning, then you do the same in reverse. There is no room to sit up and you’d be a fool not to have a wee before retiring, since the whole procedure is well-nigh impossible in the middle of the night.

I use this little tent just whenever I feel the need to take off, alone, for whatever reason. For me, it works like a battery charger when I feel weighed down by the burdens of living in community and am dragging my feet. Actually I don’t use it very much, but knowing it’s there to use if I want to is sometimes enough in itself to bring a spring back into my step.

When I do need to use it, I find it best to have a car handy, since there is nowhere to store any kit inside the tent and in my part of Scotland it’s usually raining. The car is good because it gets you far from home quickly, so no one will come tramping across the fields to find you until you are done with being alone. This usually takes two full days, but a single night would be better than nothing.

The first morning, emerging from your bivouac-thing, there is a great sense of joy and freedom. You feel quite alone in the world and no one knows who you are or why you are there. You could be in a campsite surrounded by happy families or out in the wild woods with silent, dumb creatures that creep and crawl. It makes no difference, the point is that you are alone because you wanted it this way. You don’t talk to a soul the whole time. You just get up, brew a coffee on a camping stove and then zip up the tent and go. It doesn’t really matter where you go either. You know that you have about twelve hours ahead of you just to yourself. So you start walking, along the coast, up a hill, by a river, down a valley, anywhere, on and on, stopping every now and then for a banana and a drink (massive water bottle) and a sit.

It feels good. You find yourself skipping, no, gambolling, like a newborn lamb. In your head, details about daily life swiftly give way to songs, hymns you used to know, praise, yes praise, for God’s mind blowing creation. Your thoughts then turn to God because there aren’t any people about and you find yourself chatting amicably with Him. Sometimes there are tears, sobbing even, but this comes with emptying. It’s really all about emptying. And then, renewal. This is what we miss if we don’t empty stuff.

By nightfall, the little tent and sleeping bag beckon: you greet them both joyfully and shut down. Usually it’s freezing and sleep comes in patches, but the night time wakefulness is all part of it. You use it to set things straight, mentally.

Another day ahead, more wanderings, then hunger sets in and you head for home, refreshed.

This sort of experience, this kind of rediscovery of one’s own self and its unique delights, just on its own seems a good reason for experimenting with a little solitude: if nothing else, it is a great deal cheaper than a therapist!

2. Attunement to Nature

I love this word ‘attunement’ to describe a widely shared sense that there is something crucial about solitude in relation to an engagement with nature. It is not my word, but Philip Koch’s, in his book
Solitude,
where he explores this attunement and breaks it down into three different components:

1. Clear, undistracted, sensitized perception.

2. Symbolic perception: perceiving nature as signifying or symbolizing other things.

3. Fusion/interfusion: the loss of the sense of barriers between oneself and nature, the sense of flowing out into it as it simultaneously flows through oneself.

When I wrote
A Book of Silence
I came up with an almost identical list, except that I saw them as effects of silence rather than solitude. But I have come to think that Koch may be right; nature is seldom, if ever, really silent.

The first of Koch’s list is, in a sense, fairly obvious. Nature is reclusive or ‘shy’; if you want to see, you have to pay careful attention and you have to go quietly – and both these things are much easier to do alone. I have found that even having a dog as a companion means that I see less – the birds fly away and my attention is less focused. You are more likely to perceive clearly if you are undistracted. Being alone is known to intensify all physical sensation. But there is something more to it. A great many people find they agree with Henry Thoreau that ‘it appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities that bring you near to the one estrange you from the other … The mind that perceives clearly any natural beauty is in that instant withdrawn from human society.’

The business of finding meaning, or metaphor and symbol, in nature seems an almost atavistic reaction. The gods of our ancestors were, on the whole, gods of the wild places; very small children can be entertained for hours finding images in the shapes of clouds, and the poet Wordsworth writes tragically of his character Peter Bell:

A primrose by a river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

It is less immediately clear why being alone so powerfully enhances this capacity – perhaps because there is no one to express a different symbolism, to challenge your meanings with theirs, so that the effect of your meaning can sink deeper into the mind.

The experience of fusion with, or into, nature is, when it happens, one of the highest joys of solitude. In
A Book of Silence
I describe one such episode on the Isle of Skye:

I climbed up the steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – almost vertical mountains on both sides – a mixture of shining rock and loose scree, and below, tiny stands of water that looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed casually down. It was so huge. And so wild and so empty and so free … And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief but it was a total moment.

Over and over again individuals report these extraordinary, mystical experiences when they are alone in nature. It never seems to happen if you are with anyone else, perhaps because we all have a deep inhibition against exposing ourselves so nakedly to another, even a beloved other.

3. Relationship with the Transcendent

For me personally, the transcendent is God. It is the desire for an ever more intimate relationship with God that drives my own desire to be alone, and many of the great solitude-seekers have had a similar passion. It was this that led the early Christian hermits out of their cities and into the enormous solitude of the desert; and later drove the Irish hermits to seek out tiny islands across dangerous seas, like Columba of Iona. But the search for solitude is not confined to Christianity. From the earliest traditions, Buddhists, who do not identify a ‘God’ in the Western sense, have nonetheless – more than anyone else, perhaps – used solitude and silence as a vehicle of transcendence, and have evolved a massive ‘how-to manual’ to support that practice.

In fact there is no major (and I do not know of any minor) religious or spiritual tradition that does not recognize solitude as a part of the necessary practice for revelation, intimacy and knowledge. This would suggest that those who desire an experience of the transcendent might look to a range of these well-worked traditions to see what they are up to, and how to achieve that experience of transcendence. But the state of joyful consciousness beyond the limits of the personal, the framework of the ego, does not require a religious framework.

It would appear that a period of being alone is a prelude to initiation of many kinds. We know that Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad all spent periods in solitude before launching their religious missions. We know that what the Tibetan Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo has called the ‘pressure cooker’ of solitude and retreat is normally (though there are exceptions) a necessary precursor to intense religious experiences, especially those we usually called ‘mystical’.

In many societies throughout the world a period of solitude is seen as a necessary part of such ritual initiation, and especially for rites of passage – those ceremonies which mark the transitions from one social status to another. Many Aboriginal youths, for example, are sent out into the desert, alone, for up to six months in some cases, to fend for themselves, before they can be deemed to be adults. Other societies arrange other kinds of seclusion for these crucial times of transition. For example, the Takuna of the northwest Amazon see the time when a young woman starts to menstruate as being particularly perilous; they have created a complex ritual, the
Festa das Mocas Novas
(the Feast of the New Women), which both protects and celebrates the event.

This ritual happens when a girl first menstruates; for somewhere between four and twelve weeks, she lives alone in a little room specially built inside the family home, which represents the underworld, where she is hidden from dangerous demons called the Noo. As the rite reaches its climax guests arrive wearing masks to impersonate the Noo and the girl is painted with black dye. She remains in the chamber and after three more days, under the protection of her family, she is led out to a celebration and dances all night, until dawn. She is then given a flaming brand by a shaman to throw at the Noo; their demonic power is broken and the girl is deemed to be an adult woman.

In mediaeval Europe both religious people (monks and nuns) and men about to become knights passed the night preceding their initiation in a ‘vigil’, awake but alone in preparation for their initiations.

These sorts of experience are not by any means limited to religious contexts, although socially recognized rituals probably make it easier to access the emotional states of transcendence. Bernard Moitessier, the single-handed yachtsman mentioned in
Part III
, seems to have loved being alone at sea mainly because it brought on these experiences of intense unitive awareness of transcendence. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to stand on the very edge of cliffs to provoke vertigo, which gave him a direct sensation of the transcendent (this is not a method I would advocate). John Muir, the pioneer early conservationist and inspiration behind the National Parks movement, describes poising himself on the very edge of an enormous waterfall in order to feel its power and glory. For him this clearly went beyond the ‘attunement to nature’ I discussed in the previous chapter, and opened a way into mystical experience very close to religious ecstasy.

Because rites of passage are found in almost all societies, and take such an extraordinary variety of forms – not all of them necessarily including solitude or exclusion from the group – it is difficult to generalize about what is going on or why this is so crucial to the human psyche. But this sense of meeting or encounter between transcendent powers and the individual, alone, in liminal space, is so pervasive that it is hard not to trust to such universal wisdom.