It’s almost time for school to begin for my three children, and as much as I will miss the lazy days of summer, part of me can’t wait to have the house to myself again.
My eight-year-old daughter and I share a room that is her bedroom and my office, and in the summer that becomes, let’s say, more challenging. If you and I have been on a Zoom together, chances are you saw her pop up in the background. Sorry about that. As I’m writing this blog post, she is merrily wandering around the room and offering suggestions for reorganizing my desk.
I’ll be honest. I do enjoy having my office to myself. But when my kids are out of school, the thing I miss most is Monday mornings. I know we’re all supposed to hate Monday mornings, but I love them. When everyone else is off to school and work, that’s when I set about clearing up all the weekend mess and restoring the house to order. As my daughter (who may or may not have watched too much YouTube during the summer) would say, “It is SO satisfying.”
Alone. Well, just me and the dog.
I am a classic introvert. I love to be alone. Not ALL the time, but I seem to need a healthy dose of solitude to keep functioning well. I’ve found that if I don’t have any time alone, I start trying to get that solitude in unhealthy ways, like staying up too late after everyone else has gone to bed and streaming shows I don’t really care about despite being so tired I am nodding off. Or just sitting on the sofa late at night and making note of everything that needs to be picked up or vacuumed or otherwise addressed but feeling too tired to actually get up and do any of those things.
In Henri Nouwen’s classic book Reaching Out, he describes how in the Christian life we are in constant movement along a pole from loneliness (unhealthy) at one end to solitude (healthy) at the other. And one of his most surprising insights is that neither solitude nor loneliness has much to do with whether we are alone or with other people. Instead, experiencing loneliness or solitude has more to do with our comfort level in our inner self. He explains that solitude is about being able to listen to our inner selves. If we cannot do this, we will feel lonely no matter how many people are around.
I think we all understand that it’s possible to feel lonely in a crowd. When my kids were babies, I often felt loneliness despite feeling like I would never actually be alone again (even amid the many charms of my tiny companions).
Many times we try to deal with these feelings of loneliness not by listening to our inner selves but by distracting ourselves. Nouwen writes in Reaching Out: “When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine after all” (p. 27). When I read that, I thought, “Ouch.” He wrote those words in 1975 and died in 1996. I often wonder what Nouwen would have made of smartphones.
These days I think many of us struggle particularly with listening to our inner selves when it’s oh so easy to never have to be alone with our own thoughts. I know I struggle to cultivate and protect the silence necessary for this practice in a world so very full of distractions. I love distractions. Podcasts, news articles, emails, social media feeds, streaming shows, even books. In fact, I recently wrote about how I often use reading to distract myself in just the way Nouwen described above. The world is full of so many appealing distractions, and I have to admit that I spend a lot of my precious solitude on them.
The result is that sometimes alone time feels more overwhelming than refreshing. For alone time to be healthy solitude requires at least some measure of silence.
For me, the answer is some form of silence every day. And that means silence from reading and taking in information just as much as audio silence. In fact, part of practicing silence is just listening to the world around you–whether it’s the crow cawing in my yard or the cars on the road or the dog barking at her nemesis, the mail carrier. Part of silence is also listening to your own body as well as to your inner self. What do you feel and where do you feel it? I tend to be in my head–thinking, analyzing, planning, worrying–so it’s a good practice for me to remember that I inhabit a body and check in with it. (My spiritual director is always asking me what I’m feeling or what emotion I’m experiencing, and it surprises me how often I simply don’t know.)
Silence in my house is good, while I’m doing tasks or, even better, not doing anything at all. I find silence outside to be even better.
Where do you find this silence in your day? Is it something you fit in naturally or something you have to carefully plan? Although the practice of silence does become a habit over time, I find that I do have to plan it and constantly reevaluate to make sure I am making the time for it. I still need to remind myself to turn off the music or the podcast when I’m walking the dog or watering the plants. (And silence doesn’t work for everything for me. I still can’t run without listening to music and for those of you who can, good for you and I don’t want to hear about it.)
Maybe you’re not someone who enjoys solitude and are instead energized by being around other people. You might wonder why you need solitude at all. To you, Nouwen might offer a gentle reminder that solitude is essential to community because if we cannot listen to our inner selves then we ask too much of others. For introverts and extroverts alike, if we don’t have a sense of comfort with our own inner selves, we become too needy. (Again, I say, “Ouch.”)
How are you listening to your inner self today?