Solitude: Curse or Blessing?

Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. ~Paul Johannes Tillich, The Eternal Now

My life is full of solitude. There are days I curse it and days I thank God for it.
Days I welcome it and days I dread it.

My current job is one of great solitude. I work in an organization with nearly 100 employees. My particular department, however, is isolated from the rest of the building. 90% of the employees are on the second/main floor, the rest are scattered around the first floor, and my department is on the third floor. The bulk of the third floor is occupied with a sister organization, but they're completely separated from us. We have a special portion of the building reserved just for us. You have to unlock two security doors to get to us (no, we don't count gold all day, we're just built like Fort Knox for, well, I don't know why). Myself and three colleagues edit legal manuscripts all day. For us the silence is a necessity. The other four employees perform various other functions necessary to our publication process. Within our department each person has their own office or glorified cubicle. We stay to ourselves most of the day. The quietness can be deafening at times. Lately I've commented that it is so quiet that you could hear a pin drop on the carpet.

The silence at work is occasionally broken when the administrative assistance or manager gets a phone call. A couple of us start the morning off in the downstairs kitchen getting our coffee -- we chat for a few minutes then go to our respective corners and hunker down. Occasionally something of interest comes up and several of us may gather in the common area and chat for a couple minutes. But aside from those few interactions with each other or the outside world (the phone calls), we work in solitude.

I live alone with two cats. Most of the time I can't stand the silence so I keep the TV on - a lot! Of course I watch a lot of what's on, but it's main function is usually to drown out the quiet. An elderly relative recently commented on my failure to have married and had children. The absence of these people in my life has given me a lot of unique opportunities for solitude that many others don't have. I haven't missed the joy of raising teenagers or changing diapers, I wasn't cut out for it, but the unique solitude that comes with not having someone to come home to everyday has at times been a curse, at other times a blessing. I guess it depends on the day.

Recently I've found myself turning the TV off a lot more than I used to. Despite all the solitude in my life, I sometimes find it crowds out my thoughts and just presents too many aggravating, violent, or stupid situations that I just don't want to deal with. I've discovered lately that, despite a life all too full of solitude, sometimes I need to intentionally create it so that I have a quiet space within which I can examine my thoughts and behaviors and the direction my life is (or isn't) going in right now.

During the last few weeks I've had to change the focus of my job search from the geographical area that I wanted to return to (where my friends are all living) and instead focus on a much wider region that includes large metropolitan areas that I most definitely do not want to live in. As I've faced that reality, the thing I struggle with the most is what it will mean for me in terms of complete isolation from my friends, acquaintances, my comfort zone, and anything that is at all familiar to me. As I've agonized over facing that prospect I've become even more aware of the current isolation I already find myself in and its all seemed too much. It is in those moments that I find all the solitude to be an overwhelming curse.

Then I come to this weekend and find my attitude about solitude to be completely opposite. Its been a tough couple weeks. I've really gotten on some peoples' nerves lately. Mostly over philosophical differences. The division between us has left me feeling more isolated at work then ever. Suddenly the fact that I do everything alone has just highlighted these feelings of isolation - whether its going shopping or exercising or cleaning house. These issues have only intensified the discouragement over having to look for work in areas that are unknown to me. But strangely, as all these feelings intensified I found myself longing for this weekend - a weekend in which I would have complete solitude. The irony has not escaped me. This weekend I welcomed it. But why?

Because when you need time to just stop, rest, take a deep breath, and reexamine life, solitude is a huge blessing. The fact that I have that freedom in my life has its advantages. Today I didn't have to worry about saying the wrong thing to anyone, I didn't have to worry about how anyone was perceiving my behaviors or actions, I didn't have to please anyone. Today I could enjoy the silence, in all its glory, and try to regroup. Today it was a blessing. Today I needed it and was grateful for it. I didn't even mind taking my walk alone. Today I needed time to just breathe and think and recharge.

The problems of life have definitely not been solved in this one day - in fact, I haven't solved anything. But I did come to this one realization - today's solitude was the same as yesterday's. The difference is the attitude with which I approached it. Yesterday, last week, throughout my adult life, I've not always been happy with it and have found it to be a burdensome curse. Today it was a welcome blessing. It seems it's not the solitude itself that is necessarily the problem, but rather its the attitude with which I approach it. That said, I still don't want to face a life more isolated than the one in which I find myself now, but if I can have more times in which I can appreciate the beauty of solitude then maybe that lonely road ahead won't seem so dark and foreboding. Tomorrow's solitude will be the same as today's - the only thing that is alterable is my attitude towards it.