Solitude

 

“To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that the truth is that there is nothing there that we can choose or avoid. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves an act as if this were not so. That is all we can do.  How much better to realize from the start that that is what we are, and to proceed from there.”  — Rainer Marie Rilke

I am returning to solitude like the salmon returning to the headwaters, to die and to reproduce. I am coming to appreciate the Absolute that lies within, like the silent, hardly moving times, when I am finally with my self. All is quiet, or in turmoil, and yet there is one, which I have at last come to know, who is unscathed. I am solitude. It isn’t something I have, or that has me. It is my life unfolding with change, and it is life being constant. I am nourished into being, and what I have called me, has never actually existed. Solitude is my being, it is the home I cannot leave, not a prison, but a platform where a new train is always arriving.

I feel compelled to write again about solitude, because it keeps changing me, and my relationship with this existence.

I started out wondering how I might turn my loneliness into solitude? I was suffering the corrosiveness of a life alone, without a partner, feeling exiled within this life, amongst a life filled with people. I was a social animal suffering a painful form of social phantom limb syndrome. Where are my people? I must be some kind of outcast. What is wrong with me? All I knew was a deep, pervasive sense that I was in some way painfully unfit. The days and nights of this loneliness were long, uncertain and empty. I hurt continuously, and I kept going, a zombie pretending to be alive.

Gradually, I had moments of solitude, moments that calmed me down, and stripped me bare. I was the one at the center of it all, and I couldn’t bear it. Solitude introduced me to myself. I didn’t like me, and so I couldn’t really appreciate solitude. It was much better for me to feel lonely, and to lament my condition, to long for others, than to take any responsibility for the sickly, broken, malnourished one I met when I was solitudinal. Loneliness was the price I paid for the desire to escape myself. I paid, I can’t say happily, but surely.

Loneliness became bearable, a friend really, it saved me from the unbearable. I pretended the one I met, the one at the center, wasn’t me. I was smart, I could hide well, in plain sight often, disguised as one who knew, who went within. I was crafty, converting my dreaded glimpses into passing insight, looking like a deep person when I was actually treading water in the shallow end of the pool. I got away with it. Sort of. Too few had gone deeply within, so I looked good, but someone within knew the difference, and I grew more fearful that my fraudulence would show. I could see that I was an empty shirt, I despaired that others would too. The fact that they often didn’t, or refused to engage with me, and my fraudulence, deepened my despair.

I was alone anyway. No amount of relationship, family, community, or busy-ness changed that. Finally, I could bear the anxious effort, the pseudo-connections, no more. I collapsed. I could have killed myself, so deep was my despair, so determined my refusal to take any responsibility for my condition, the malnourished one within. I could be cruel, to myself, and others, but I lacked the courage to kill myself. Maybe it was luck, or grace, but whatever the case, I gave in to my aloneness. I think the stroke; disability, the long time on the threshold of death, all aided me. For at last I came to my senses. I came to face the one within.

Death isn’t so bad. There is a solving relief that accompanies the terminal phase. There isn’t any more that can be done, a kind of justice abides with being finished. But facing the privilege of going on, and knowing your self a fraud, even (maybe especially) a good one, is a truly fearsome thing. A second chance is an awesome gift, but then again, it is only worth it, if you face what you refused to face the first time.  Solitude, once it is admitted, is populated by the self-made demons of self-doubt that one accumulates in a lifetime. For long lonely hours I sat vigil with a man who had come to believe in his fears.

Solitude saves me, daily, hourly, even now as I write this. I know that whatever I am, I am, because I let the mystery of my being, the mystery of all being, come to me in solitude. Now, I know, that my writing, loving, compassion, life itself, all rely on my willingness to come to these headwaters. I am nourished by being what I am, a solitudinal mystery, afoot in life, true to the mystery of my origins.

The words of Rilke (above) live in me now, not as a profound quote to be remembered, but as true description of a necessary condition of this life. I am as free as I am, and that means I am free to be me, whatever that may be, because I am solitude rolling through this world, world rolling solitudinally through this life. 

l/d