On Being Alone

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, to feel alone or want to be alone is deeply unfashionable: to admit to feeling alone is to reject and betray others, as if they are not good company, and do not have entertaining, interesting lives of their own to distract us; and to actually seek to be alone is a radical act. To want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door, and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary.”

     It is one thing to be by one’s self and another to be with one’s self. The former implies physical separation/isolation, a state of being that depending on circumstances, can feel lonely or comforting. The latter is a matter of intrapersonal connection, a sense of completeness that can be experienced independent of interaction with others. It is this understanding of aloneness that poet David Whyte writes about in the piece quoted above. To choose to be with one’s self, he says, is “deeply unfashionable” and is a radical way of being that, in our extraverted culture, is often considered anti-social.

     It has been said that if we cannot be content alone, we cannot be in a relationship in a truly significant way. If we are unable to abide ourselves apart from others, if we require their company and conversation in order to feel real and alive, we will not be able to meet them in what Jewish philosopher and sage Martin Buber has termed an “I-Thou” manner, one that is the encounter of one soul with another.

     Making a similar point, Bavarian poet Rainer Maria Rilke claims that intimacy is two solitudes bordering and saluting one another. Meaningful closeness, in other words, requires individuals who are whole unto themselves. Without this depth of maturity, relationships tend to become dependent rather than interdependent, dysfunctional rather than healthy.

     It is something of a paradox, but if we want to draw closer to others we must be willing and able to be alone with ourselves, that state of being wherein we can experience the comforting, spiritual presence that might enable us to say “never less alone than when alone.”