Blackie In Praise of Solitude

In Praise of Solitude

I was recently asked to contribute to an interesting new project run by a major international organisation. The idea was that a dozen or so ‘influential’ people would take several long weekends over the course of a few months to creatively explore the relationship between humans, wilderness and wellbeing (to paraphrase the project’s aims.) I was to be the writer for the project. As a result of the time that we would spend doing this, we would be asked to communicate our experiences to a wider audience in a variety of different ways. Sounded fascinating, sounded like something seriously worthwhile, even though the organisation in question was asking for a substantial unpaid time commitment. Sounded like a project whose aims I fully supported and believed in. We were made for each other.

The deal-breaker? It was deemed to be essential to the functioning of the group (and I guess, by extension, the project itself) that we should all split into couples and share rooms i.e. sleep together.

I never did receive a good explanation of why it was necessary, or why it would a good thing to have a group that couldn’t tolerate difference. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I can’t do that. Never could, never will. Put me in a bed in a room with one or more complete strangers and I won’t relax, won’t sleep a wink. It’s utter torture. What made me quite angry (and trust me, it isn’t the first occasion that I, or others that I know like me, have been put in this situation and been made quite angry as a result of it ... or have decided not to make a fuss and simply self-selected themselves out of interesting and valuable experiences because this was a requirement) was the implicit assumption that, if you can’t do that, you must at a minimum be incapable of fully integrating into a group, and at a maximum be sociophobic. That somehow or other the ‘group dynamic’ will be ruined as a consequence.

Nonsense. For a number of years, in a former life as a chartered psychologist, I worked with all kinds of groups in all kinds of settings. I also have participated in a number of ‘retreat-type’ group projects over the years. Whether or not the participants sleep together has never, in my experience, had anything to do with the cohesiveness of the group (and in fact, not sleeping together has almost certainly enhanced it on many occasions! I remember quite vividly the experience of one poor woman at a writing course a couple of years ago who was forced to take a sleeping bag and sleep in the back of her car to escape the snorings, mutterings and compulsive tossings and turnings of the complete stranger she was packed into a tiny little room with. She didn’t sleep especially comfortably there, but at least she got to do it in peace). When there have been people in these groups who have chosen to sleep separately where that option was offered to them, they were neither raving lunatics nor sociophobes. They were simply normal people who didn’t sleep well in very close quarters with complete strangers. Normal people who needed deeply, in the midst of a group, to have the opportunity to find themselves again. To take time out, time to breathe. To be able to be comfortable within themselves at that most vulnerable time of the day: when they go to sleep.

It’s interesting how people differ in this regard. My husband, for example, was stuffed into a dormitory with a good handful of other kids at a boy’s boarding school from the age of nine. This was followed by 25 years in the RAF during which period, as you can imagine, he learned to sleep on a meat-hook. Any place, any time, any circumstances. It was a question of survival. He values his solitude more than almost anyone else I know, and yet he can’t see that who you sleep with or where should ever be a problem. On the other hand, I have a neighbour who is a mother of three, grandmother of at least six, surrounded by family all the time, one of the most sociable people I know. The idea of sleeping in somebody else’s house, let alone in the same room with somebody else, strikes horror into her heart. ‘I wouldn’t sleep a wink,’ she says. ‘I’d go quite mad. I wouldn’t know who I was any more.’

Why is it that, so often, the need for solitude is deemed to be in some way threatening to others who don’t need it? Why is it perceived to be some kind of bizarre aberration that needs careful management? As Ann Morrow Lindbergh said, ‘What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice.’ If I were the kind of person who believed such things to be a valuable use of time (I don’t, as a rule) I’d set up a campaign. I’d rail against those who insist that we all have to be like them; I’d rant about discrimination against people who need, sometimes, to be alone. I’d have posters and stickers and tee-shirts... But I’m not that kind of person, and so all I can do is write this small article in praise of solitude.

One of the finest books I know on the subject is Anthony Storr’s book, Solitude. Storr, a well-known psychiatrist, explores the critical connection between solitude and the creative personality, and also examines the use that people make of solitude in times of bereavement and depression, in escaping from the pressures of daily life, and ‘in finding and expressing their deepest selves.’ His conclusion is a very simple one: the need to be alone is a deep human need, and a profoundly neglected one. ‘I shall argue that human beings are directed by Nature toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal, and that this feature of the human condition is a valuable and important part of our adaptation ... If we were to listen only to the psychoanalytic “object relations” theorists, we should be driven to conclude that none of us have validity as isolated individuals. From their standpoint, it appears that we possess value only in so far as we fulfil some useful function vis-a-vis other people... It follows that the justification for the individual’s existence is the existence of others.’

Barbara Holland’s One’s Company is a much lighter but equally compelling look at the value of solitude, in the particular context of living alone. Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness deals with the other extreme: hermits, solitaries and recluses. She says: ‘...in the modern Western world solitude is undervalued, and the need for it forgotten. To wish to be alone is thought odd, a sign of failure or neurosis; but it is in solitude that the self meets itself, or, if you like, its God, and from there that it goes out to join the communal dance.’ Exactly so. For those of us who have a true need for solitude, the only way we can safely and happily ‘join the communal dance’ is to be allowed to retreat back out of it when we need to. It’s then that we can become valuable participating members of a community – not by having community forced upon us.

Solitude can be especially important in wilderness contexts. Ruskin, for example, wrote about the joy that he found in nature in the following way: ‘I could only feel this when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and fear of it...’ Thoreau, of course, wrote much about nature and solitude, especially in Walden: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...’

I was delighted, some time ago, to find that one of my favourite writers, Sara Maitland, is writing a book on solitude: A Book of Silence. I believe it’s due out this November. Read it. ‘We all live noisy lives,’ she says, in an article about it – see this link. ‘We choose to live noisy lives. We choose to banish silence from modernity. We exile it to the desert where the hermits went to seek it. We forget, we choose to forget, just how much silence there is. It is everywhere, necessary, secret and very powerful.’

Silence and solitude: necessary and powerful indeed. And I can’t help but believe that we’d all be considerably saner if we practiced a little more of it.