A Meditation on Solitude

"None of us can afford solitude if we do not live in community, nor can we have real community without solitude."  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

 

The above paradox is more than abstraction, for we are only ourselves in relation to our community. What happens if we have no community?

Perhaps that question explains why so many sleep-deprived, stressed out Americans stay compulsively busy. Too much of life—I should say the American life since that’s my measure of the world—is wasted in movement.

America used to be associated with a restless passion to seek new worlds of every kind: Go West, young man, go west! Pioneers explored a continent they thought would take a hundred years to cross in twenty. Where darkness once reigned, people suddenly had electricity and then refrigerators and, best of all, automobiles. Orville Wright saw the day when ideas spawned or nurtured by the toothpick airplane he and his brother first flew led men to create jets that transported millions of people all over the world. American energy became an almost breathing entity that, like the little engine that could, puffed and puffed until men walked on the moon. One giant step.

Now that energy seems too kinetic, faux really. Lady Gaga has replaced Irving Berlin. College students frenetically click out a text or talk incessantly, their cell voices dominant even when they sit half a dozen at a dinner table. And when they’re older, what will it be? Not bars or parties but work, little league, church—still rushing wherever they go, cell phones still dangling from hands or ears. Nonstop.

At some point, will they long for quiet, uncounted minutes broken by the occasional word or laugh, the unhurried comment from a friend? True friendship—deep friendship born out of trial and tribulation, periods of failure and celebration—take years of patience and perseverance to develop. From these “soul” friendships come communities where people can share their fears as readily as they share their triumphs.

Perhaps our need to squeeze minutes so tightly that we do not sit and talk without a clock or cell phone in the room is a signal, a sign, that we can’t allow ourselves to be alone because doing so might make us admit that our lives have become so much about marketing ourselves rather than being ourselves that we have nothing to think about in solitude and no one to turn to when we face our own cavernous soul.