Solitude

Facing The Self, Testing the Boundaries

Photo by Kseniia Rastvorova on Unsplash

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Long story short: I ended up going about 20 miles out into the mountains. I saw no one after my first day. I ran out of food on day three. I hadn’t packed enough. I slightly panicked, but I knew I’d be ok. I’ve always been like this: My soul prefers struggle. It’s who I am. I have a self-fulfilling suffering machine within me. Melodramatic, depressed artist here; guilty as charged.

~

On New Year’s Eve, just a few days ago, aka my 42^nd birthday, one of my oldest friends (we met sophomore year of high school in the year 2000) gave me as a gift a copy of a thin novel by Paulo Coelho from 2012 called Manuscript Found in Accra.

It’s a beautiful piece of writing, with delicious, pithy little sayings which remind me vaguely of the sayings in Alcoholics Anonymous but it also reminded me of The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. It also generally reminds me of another book I’ve been reading recently, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

All these books and teachings seem to blend some form of Buddhism with a sense of owning your own actions, taking responsibility, understanding the foundation of your own inherent nature, being in the present moment, choosing love over hate, accepting yourself and things as they are without needing to change them, and focusing on your inner life as a means to move forward in the world.

Coelho also discusses solitude.

All my life I’ve been a man of solitude, someone who appreciates, likes and enjoys being on my own, forging my own unique experiences. Though there have been plenty of periods of loneliness in my decades alive, much of the time I was physically alone I felt perfectly content. Probably some of this has to do with my genetic disposition: Both my parents are/were solitary people, a duopoly who didn’t need all that much beyond their marriage, though my mom did and does have a small crew of close and loving friends. My father was always “self-sustaining,” as my mother called it, meaning he didn’t rely on other people outside of work for comfort. He had my mother for that, and his own mind and routines and work.

I’ve always been the same way. It seems strange in our culture. I’ve always had a smattering of close friends wherever I went, whatever city I ended up in (and there were many), but I never felt the urgent need to be with people. I’ve never fully liked, trusted or respected people. Even myself. In fact especially myself. I saw the flaws in the human machine, in all of us, the penchant for manipulation, for lying, for mythmaking, for dishonesty, for selfishness, and I, as it were “opted out.” Before 2010 I did spend a lot of time with various people (friends), but the alcohol cured me of my existential, irrational, Kafkaesque fear.

After sobriety, things changed, but even now my fundamental fear of people is not cured. People scare me; they always have. I scare myself sometimes, when I locate my own locus of anger, fear, jealousy, selfishness.

But it goes beyond all this, too.

Solitude has always attracted me because it’s safe, it’s honest, it’s true. It is, for me, impeachable, even pure. This is why one of my most cherished pastimes is backpacking. My father taught me the joy of backpacking, starting in the mid-1990s, when I was a boy. We’d go to Matilija Canyon, in the mountains of Ojai, where I grew up. We often didn’t speak for long periods of time. I walked slowly behind the old man, his big hands clasped calmly behind him as he maneuvered across creeks and boulders. I learned to trust silence, to appreciate being in Nature, to grasp that sometimes there are moments when speech or distraction are unnecessary, even destructive.

Starting in my early twenties I began backpacking solo. This became a lifelong ritual. There’s something about the deep silence, being surrounded by not people, not electronics, not the internet, not human folly but mountains, streams, trees, rock, earth. My father’s father used to take my dad up into the Yosemite Sierra mountains using donkeys to carry their gear. So it runs in the family.

It’s the purity of nature, I think, that draws me. It’s an entity of elements that doesn’t need anything from you, doesn’t want anything, doesn’t have any secret hidden agendas, isn’t trying to “achieve” anything. It simply is. It’s honorable, reliable, certain, and yes, sometimes deliciously unpredictable.

Most people cannot handle solitude. They interpret it as boredom or loneliness. Because they do not know themselves on a deep level. Because they feel they require constant distractions. Because to stop, pause, take some breaths, lean into solitude, into oneself, is terrifying for most people. Most people don’t understand themselves; they avert their eyes, they utilize their inherent defense mechanisms, they use electronics as a form of constant distraction. At bottom these people fear death, which makes absolute sense and yet is unnecessary. Life, as we know, is death, and death is life. They’re eternally interconnected.

That’s not to say that I don’t fear death. Of course I do. (I know there are some of you who will claim you do not.) But it doesn’t drive my life. Rather, I lean into thoughts of death, not in a morbid way but in a healthy human way.

Most people nowadays—especially those under say 45—can’t stand silence, solitude, facing themselves in any meaningful way. Gen Z is a generation of distraction, total superficial electronic connection coupled with serious, massive human disconnection. Boredom has been nearly eradicated at this point: There is always the Smart Phone, a phenomenon that has made many of us incredibly dumb.

I remember a moment on my trip across Canada and into Alaska with Britney last year. We were staying on a woman’s property in the middle of nowhere somewhere around west-central Canada. The exact location is irrelevant. The woman had a farm with chickens and goats and we parked our car in a field and set up our tent.