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.

Aging

So, today is my birthday. I'm now officially closer to 50 than I was to 40. This annual ritual we go through takes on different meanings over the years. All through my 20s and 30s I still felt like I was growing up. Mentally, things shifted dramatically during my 40s - now I feel like I'm just growing older - not that I'm always mature, mind you, there's just something about crossing that half-way mark in life that puts a different spin on things.

Truthfully, I think I like the 40s. In some ways I still mentally feel like I'm in my 30s (I'm not delusional enough to still feel like I'm in my 20s). I suspect not raising children has kept me feeling mentally young. I'm so much more cognizant in this decade of what's important in life. I look back at the things that used to rile me up 20 years ago and today I can look at the same things and realize they just aren't worth the mental energy. I deal with stressful situations different in my 40s then I did a couple decades ago. Now I'm more able to step back, put some of the emotion aside, and try to look at a problem rationally and try to look at both sides (still a challenge sometimes but easier than it used to be).

I think I'm aware of emotional aging more than physical aging - and I enjoy and am consciously aware of the emotional aging. I rationalize differently, I react differently, I prioritize differently. And honestly, I feel its for the better. It's something I've worked at over the years and am only beginning to see the efforts pay off. Emotional maturity is an evolutionary process and being conscious of it is rewarding and challenging and exciting all at the same time. At times I see how I'm handling things now, comparing my reaction to how I used to handle things, and occasionally almost wishing I could go back and redo some of my life. But those years are water under the bridge.

Life, with all its ups and downs, all its challenges, and all its lessons, is a learning experience - if we choose to make it so and not let it get the best of us. I love the line "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Life does try to break us all at one time or another. It's sent me my share of challenges over the years but I can honestly say I have grown stronger at the broken places. It's all a work in progress. Life may be half over but there's still half to go - I hope it's a great adventure.

Book Review - Andrew Jackson: His Life & Times by H.W. Brands

I FINALLY finished this lengthy tome on Andrew Jackson. His life was fascinating, to say the least, but I sadly found little in this president to admire.

To be sure, Jackson's childhood hardly suggested the path that would lead anyone to the presidency of the United States. He lost all of his family to death at an early age and had to fend for himself. His childhood was beyond difficult and it is to his credit that he became the successful man that he did.

My biggest problem with Jackson was his love of killing people - be it in a dual or war. He was never happier than when at war - and he was at war often - against the Indians, the British, the Spanish, and the Mexicans. He was plagued with a life-time of debilitating illnesses, often confined to bed for days on end, but he would mysteriously always be able to rouse himself whenever it appeared he would be called on to lead men into war. He wasn't beyond provoking war to get what he wanted - which is exactly what he did when he decided, as a general, that Florida should be taken from the Spanish and made a part of the United States. His treatment of the Indians was abhorrent and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indians, not just through war, but also through forced relocation, especially during what became known as the "Trail of Tears" when the Cherokees were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi.

Jackson also advocated for the continuation of slavery and held a number of slaves himself throughout his lifetime. He alternated between between paternalistic and abusive of them.

He was singularly devoted to his wife, who died right after he was elected president. In one of the great ironies in life, he and his wife actually adopted and lovingly raised two young Indian boys. Rachel's death clouded the rest of his life as he felt responsible for it because she never wanted him to be president. He barely pulled himself together enough to get through his inauguration.

Jackson is often referred to as the "first president of the people," or by terms similar. This was not through his own doing for Jackson never actually wanted to be, or campaigned to be, president. His friends and supporters did it for him and he felt it was his duty to respond to the call of the people. Before Jackson's election, America's presidents were chosen behind closed doors and it was basically a given who the president would be. The voting was merely a formality. So in that sense Jackson was the first president of the people because it was the first election in which the people really had a genuine say in who would lead them.

Jackson's guiding political philosophy was his belief in democracy. His belief that people knew what was best for themselves and were capable of making informed choices. This was exactly opposite the belief of his arch rival, John Quincy Adams, who was a staunch proponent of republicanism and felt the people incapable of knowing what was best for themselves. Brands says at the end of his book that Jackson believed "[d]emocracy wasn't a perversion of the republican promise but its perfection, or at least a large step toward perfection."

Jackson's strongest desire for his country, one he held to until his dying day, was that at all costs the Union should be preserved - that if it fell apart then foreign countries would seize its pieces and it would never be whole again. During his presidency, his passion nearly led him to war against South Carolina when it threatened to nullify a tariff and secede from the Union. This passion led him to fight (politically) for the annexation of Texas, the ousting of the Indian population, and to support slavery (believing the South's economy would collapse without it and knowing the South would secede if the abolitionists got into power). It was on his deathbed that he won his last political battle when he learned that Congress had voted to annex Texas and make it part of the Union.

Brands' book focuses mostly on Jackson's early life and his years as a general. Others have criticized the work for not focusing more on his presidency, but other books have been written on that portion of his life and I hope to read one of them in the not-too-distant future. I think the book did well at exploring the times he lived in and how he fit into and then helped change those times.

It is easy to set here in 2009 and judge a man who was quick to war and who defended slavery. One can argue times were different and notions of civil rights and equal rights were not developed at all in that era. But even understanding that the thinking of that era was different and less evolved than it is now, just doesn't excuse, for me, Jackson's principals, his inability to find value in all men, regardless of race or heritage, and his love of fighting and killing. I can appreciate the things he accomplished in light of his disadvantaged childhood, and I subscribe in many respects to his view of democracy. But his insatiable need for war and death left me cold.