Cast away on a desert island, you might meet someone important: yourself
TODAY is the 75th anniversary of BBC Radio 4’s perennial Desert Island Discs and David Beckham is the programme’s special guest. Like all castaways before him, he’ll be asked to choose eight favourite records as sole companions for the rest of his life on the imaginary desert island. The only other constant presence there will be solitude. In a world where we almost fetishise individualism and where self-esteem and self-realisation are the standard benchmarks for mental and emotional health, it is paradoxical that solitude is often regarded with dread, fear and suspicion. Despite our protestations about the need to be ourselves, we struggle to spend time by ourselves, with ourselves. For some, the prospect of being in a state of non-connectivity, a Facebook-less, wifi-less wilderness, with nothing and no-one for distraction, is the stuff of nightmares. Time spent completely alone for significant periods is time failed, time emptied, filled in only by the aching absence of others, characterised by longing and frustration. Time alone must be borne bravely, like a foul-tasting medicine. Yet the healing and creative properties of fruitful solitude are abundant and edifying. That’s if you can bear the pain of getting there. It is perhaps our tendency to confuse solitude with loneliness – with all its connotations of failure and rejection – that makes us give the whole business of solitude a very wide berth. While the two are connected, they are not the same. Many of us are brought to solitude kicking and screaming, having served a gruelling apprenticeship in loneliness.
LONELINESS is the resistance of solitude. It’s an ache, an almost physical pain that permeates our entire being. It is a place where nothing grows except depression, self-doubt and shame. Once it takes hold, the stigma of loneliness grows like wildfire, blocking all our exits. Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of mind full of meaning and possibility. It’s a stoical and sedate place where, rather than just being nodding acquaintances, we can enter into an authentic dialogue with ourselves, what we think, feel and understand about the world we find ourselves in, about the universal dilemma of being human.
In solitude, we craft out time and space to understand and find meaning in our relationship with self and with others. It’s a building site for creativity, but like all building sites, it can get messy. To get to real solitude, to experience its possibilities, most of us have to stare into the abyss for a good while. It’s a bit like tunnelling underground. At first it is bleak, dark and cold. You have to keep digging to get through to the light. It can be soul-destroying work. But if you are prepared to keep at it (even when you doubt you’ll ever break through to the other side), the rewards of solitude are plentiful. You may discover that by developing the art of being alone with yourself, you are more able to really enjoy the company of others.
BY contemplating in solitude the irrefutable reality that we are born alone and die alone, you may feel less afraid, truly alive and more connected with the natural world around you. What we fear about solitude – the dark triad of abyss, abandonment and aloneness – is the very stuff that brings us through into the light of a truly intimate relationship with ourselves. Really getting to know and understand ourselves means spending time alone, being curious about how and why we ended up being the person we are now or were back then.
Tracing the trajectory of our personhood requires focus and commitment. You can’t multi-task this with posting photos on Instagram or watching the finale of The Great British Bake Off. To mine the riches of solitude, we need to be prepared to cultivate periods of time alone, to peer down into the bottom of the well until, when our eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, we begin to grasp the depth of what lies beneath.
Like falling in love, when we spend hours obsessing and fantasising about the object of our desire, solitude demands that we stop, listen and fall a little in love with ourselves. Relationships with others come and go, crash and burn; but our relationship with self is fundamental and lasts a whole life long. A regular dose of solitude is the best fertiliser for a sane and happy marriage.