Usefully alone

In this episode, we explore the value to be gained in those times when we’re usefully alone.

I’ve lived on my own for most of my adult life - though that’s not by choice as such, more just that that’s the way life tends to pan out for a perennial outsider like me. And yes, there are times - a lot of times, to be honest - when that fact will trigger a crippling sense of loneliness and isolation, of being literally out of touch with the rest of the human race. Yet there are also times when the opposite occurs, and instead it brings on a sense of being usefully alone: time to slow down; time to reflect; time to connect with the world once more in a different, richer way…

For me, that so-useful state arose again earlier this week. We had a small gathering of professional colleagues to plan out the futures for the discipline, held at a quiet farm owned by one of the group out in the coastal hinterland. There wasn’t enough room at the main farmhouse for everyone to sleep there, so some of us were placed elsewhere around the farm. In my case, with a couple of the other guys, that was out in the original handbuilt homestead, a mile or so away from the new one, down a bumpy up-and-down farm-track threading its way through the fields and the forest.

I’d arrived a day earlier than the others in my group, so I’d had the place to myself for a while. It had been a long hectic drive to get there, interspersed by a couple of difficult business-meetings along the way, so a safe place to stay like that was definitely a welcome space in which to unwind. No internet there, no phone-signal; the basic modern amenities, for sure, but nothing else of the modern world. A place to slow down, enough to allow noticing to happen again. To see the quiet oddities of the world, such as the full-grown trees pushing their way through the wooden cargo-bed of an old abandoned truck…

…and the small green tree-frog sitting undisturbed on one of the old timbers on the bathroom wall.

Being in the right place plays an important part in this - and yet it’s not always the obvious places that can bring on this state of being usefully alone. For example, the hosts had recommended that I should visit a riverside state-park a few miles away: and yes, I did see some ‘items of interest’ such as a man playing with his dog in the river, some strange flowers and blossoms up amongst the trees, and a bush-turkey plodding its way across the dusty grass.

Yet in practice all that that visit did was reinforce the loneliness all over again. (The constant howl of cars and trucks along the road mere yards away didn’t exactly help the mood, of course.)

Not so useful, anyway. Oh well.

Odd…

---

Yet what’s the difference between aloneness and loneliness? What’s useful or not-useful about any of this? And why is this important, anyway?

---

Loneliness, well, yeah, it ain’t fun. It gnaws away at the soul, relentlessly; and it drives all manner of other un-fun feelings, such as lack of worth or self-worth, a feeling not so much of being unwanted as not even noticeable enough to be worth the effort of ‘unwanting’. “Faces look ugly / when you’re alone”, as Jim Morrison put it in his 1967 song ‘People Are Strange’. Yeah, that kind of loneliness. Not fun.

But if we can shift the focus from loneliness to aloneness, a lot of useful things can happen: literally, usefully alone, with an emphasis on ‘useful’ rather than ‘alone’.

On one side, it’s actually a spiritual issue (or, if the word ‘spiritual’ worries you, use the word ‘aspirational’ - it comes down to the same thing in the end). As I put it in that previous episode on mental-health and spiritual-health, it centres around a set of closely-related themes:

a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self and of relationship with that which is greater than self

These are themes that are all strictly personal. Despite the promises of religions and brands and the like, no-one else can resolve these for us: we have to do it for ourselves. And whilst the part about ‘relationship with that which is greater than self’ may be something that we can do with others, for most of the rest we’ll often have to be alone, whether we like it or not. There’s no escaping that requirement. (Unless we’re willing to accept a life without any sense of self, meaning or purpose, of course, though that’s generally reckoned to be Not A Good Idea…)

The other side of this is that, often, the ideas and insights we need will only arise when we allow ourselves to slow down, get outside of the loneliness-loop, and place ourselves in a place where we can just kind of be, really, with nothing in particular going on at all. Being in the shower is one well-known place where this tends to happen; another is being on a walk, quietly away from others; and for me, as above, that old wooden farmhouse this week was one such place, too.

Usefully alone. It matters.

---