–Analysis-
BOGOTÁ — Several years ago, I was eating lunch in New York. I had arrived a few months before from Italy, and my English wasn’t fluent, so I used every opportunity to meet people and practice the language. My conversation partner and I broached the subject of spirituality and its role in our lives, when an older woman interrupted our discussion. With her silvery hair and face full of wrinkles from quite a few years of living, she insisted that “the best spirituality is keeping busy.”
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Today, 25 years later, those words still resonate with me; they accurately capture our zombie lives in a frenzied world where we fear finding ourselves inactive, or alone with ourselves, even briefly.
The fear of being lonely
Our fear of loneliness —or even aloneness — is so great we stifle it at all times, either by surfing the net, sharing messages and memes online or on Whatsapp, or even playing games with people on the other side of the world.
When we finally emerge from our room, it’s either meetings, get-togethers, drinking or some other compulsive habit. These are rituals meant to keep us perpetually busy and never feeling alone.
Escapism and life have become one and the same here. Spanish author Borja Vilaseca raises the alarm in his latest book Ama tu soledad (“Love Your Solitude”) about how much we’ve lost touch with ourselves and become dependent on others. Socializing is a drug to make us forget a painful sense of abandonment often sourced in our childhood or growing up in dysfunctional families.
Importance of learning to be alone
The way out of loneliness, Vilaseca writes, is to move toward “aloneness” or solitude, a state in which we can deeply connect with ourselves. It is a paradoxical skill in a society that wants us to connect at all times and stigmatizes the solitary individual.
It is in solitude that we can find and learn to love ourselves.
But there can be no sense of fulfillment, real compassion or authentic bonds with others if we cannot nurture this ability in ourselves. It is in solitude that we can find and learn to love ourselves. If you’re happy with yourself, says Vilaseca, you won’t be waiting for people “to give you permission, accompany or pat you on the back so you can go on. You just go.” Walking alone won’t be a problem, he writes, as you are “going with you.”
Solitude can provide the clarity and courage needed to leave the path you’re on and take the one in your heart instead. It is a transition that may prove choppy and arduous, but likely the only one allowing us to live more consciously — and less like a puppet. Before you embark on the adventure, you might do worse things than to read Vilaseca’s book.
