(I wrote this 7 years ago, but still seems fresh, especially amidst the chaos that the pandemic has unleashed on us.)

Solitude. Singular. Alone.

Solitude is time. It is the unburdened, uncluttered, and unclaimed ether of time through which one floats, suspended like a dust mote. It is hours of lying on the terrace and staring up at the blue sky, feeling like an embryo within an un-hatched egg, sensing a thrumming potential outside the shell but not yet able to touch it. Sometimes the shell cracks, a key turns, and an answer flows through.

Solitude is escape. It is rushing in fast trains through unfamiliar land, disconnected from the origin or destination, cocooned in a pod.  It is being lost in nothingness, far above the ground, watching light grow and fade over a sea of clouds outside the small window. You don’t have to be what you were when you started. You don’t need to be what you might be when you land.

Solitude is discovery, often beyond the edge of one’s comfort, conditioning, prejudices and timorousness. It is walking through strange cities and towns, in museums and galleries, along rivers and lakes, during rain, shine or snow. It is gaining a visceral knowledge of the world beyond words and images. It is finding out that if you are outdoors when it is -22 deg C, your eyelashes freeze; that when a river floods, there is unimaginable quantity of water that relentlessly and inexorably drowns everything; that artists paint or sculpt nudes because there is nothing else more structurally beautiful than the human form; or that tropical forests have puzzling and overwhelming level of biodiversity.

Solitude is being alone. Alone, when attacked by hands in buses and crowds that invade your sanctity with impunity. Alone, while the hot inexpert hands and lips grope and grab, appropriately and inappropriately, in living rooms and bedrooms, pubs and beaches and cars. Alone, remote, unmoved…

Solitude is pain. It is physical pain that is highly personal, non-shareable, and unreachable from outside. You may tremble; shiver, cry and scream in pain, but are completely alone, isolated in the prison of pain’s device. Sometimes, through its fog, consuming presence and hallucinations, comes empathy. The next time you say, “I understand,” to someone suffering, you really do.

Connectedness is finding another who has traversed his or her own solitude. Connectedness is acceptance of self and the other. Connectedness is able to share and stand by “to the level of every day’s most quiet need…” Connectedness is the quiet, beautiful, and joyful moments together after spent passion.

Connectedness is nature—alone or in a crowd, silent or bustling. It is experiencing the fullness of being, a knowing of the locus of your existence in the warp and weft of the fabric of the universe. It is being devoid of delusions or expectations of a grand design. It is being home.