just how much they love someone while they’re booking back-to
back-to-back meetings.
If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon
put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.
Who isn’t stiller in the morning, or when they’re up before the
house stirs, before the phone rings or the commutes have begun?
Who isn’t better equipped to notice the meaning of the moment
when it’s quiet, when your personal space is being respected? In
solitude time slows down, and while we might find that speed hard to
bear at first, we will ultimately go crazy without this check on the
busyness of life and work. And if not driven crazy, we will certainly
miss out.
Solitude is not just for hermits, but for healthy, functioning
people. Although there is a thing or two we can learn about solitude
from the people who turned pro at it.
In 1941, then just twenty-six years old, Thomas Merton reported
to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, and began his
first of many journeys into monkish solitude that would go on, in
various forms, for the next twenty-seven years. His solitude was
hardly indolent repose. It was instead an active exploration of
himself, of religion, of human nature, and later, into solving serious
societal problems like inequality, war, and injustice. In his beautiful
journals, we find insights into the human experience that would have
been impossible if Merton had spent his time in a newspaper bullpen
or even on a university campus.
He would come to call solitude his vocation. As he wrote:
To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in
the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the
evening when night falls upon that land and when the
silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a
true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to
belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their
bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence,
and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and
vigilant silence.