It is spring time again. I am sitting at my desk in a house
which is so silent for me that I could hear a bird alight on the roof. No one
comes in clamouring for a tea-party. No one calls me to their house for just “Gup-Shup”.
No one interrupts me with an anxious “Haven’t you worked enough for today?”
The silence began seven years ago, on a similar beautiful
spring day full of the sound of running water. My wife gave me a quick hug and
dashed out of the door, “Hold the fort! I’ll be back soon.” But long before
that “soon”, she had fallen, stricken by a heart attack. She never came home
again.
My experience feels unique to me, but of course it is not.
There are legions of lonely widows and widowers. If we live longer, most of us
will have one or more sequences of it during our lives.
We who are solitary are visited from time to time by great
gusts of loneliness. We are scarred by those dismal hours in which what we have
to do—without anyone helping us—seems just too much. We are overwhelmed by a
longing for the paired life of others, for the joy of sharing experiences.
But solitude can also be a way of life full of satisfaction,
warmth and even joy. Looking back now after the healing years, I see some of these
rewards crystallising in my mind. Where does this warmth come from?
First of all, from memory, which holds together the days of
my life. Solitude enhances memory. And so, the, curiously, the memory has
strengthened in me the state of the continuity in my life even though the grief
has interrupted it. From these enhanced memories comes a new kind of
understanding.
If solitude is warmed by memory, it is warmed also by a
growing sense of my own identity. After I had been alone for a few weeks, I
found myself caught in innumerable dialogues—between the self who wanted to die
and the self who wanted to live, the self who believed and the one who denied,
the self who loved and the one who repudiated love because it hurts too much.
Caught in these
struggles, I had a chance to come to come to grips with my unexplained feelings
and answer some important questions. Why I do this and not that? What am I to
do with my life? When we live surrounded by people, some of the passion and
insight natural to us leaks away through the sieve of small talks.
Everyday, too, the
solitary person—still fighting the human battle against growing up—must cope
with something new. Quickly and painfully, I have discovered what kind of a
human being I am, what kind of resources I have. And in solitude, “there is no
place that does not see you.” Only honesty is good enough.
And many a time solitude has enlightened me by the discovery
of what the Quakers call “that of God in every man.”
We have empty, therefore open, hearts which we did not have
when preoccupied with one love. We are freer to meet the strangers, freer to
talk to them in depth.
The sorrows of others seem to enter our solitude as though
they were framed by the understanding of our own struggles. And so, though we
spend less time in the presence of others, what we do spend there has a new and
special quality. More often than in the past my friends and I communicate on a
deeper level, perhaps because I now talk more freely and honestly to them.
But it is not tranquil. The inward life of those upon whom
solitude has been thrust is a threshing floor of emotions. I suspect that
solitude never leaves you the one as when it found you. You emerge from it angrier
or gentler, sterner or more compassionate, more bitter or more loving, more
shut within or more communicative, but never the same.
Like a more important learning experiences, solitude is full
of pain.” Nothing good ever happens to me.” I do not think so, if I keep a good
book. Looking back at the pages, I can watch myself growing and discover how
unpredictable and wonderful life can be.
Turn everything to understanding. This is the special virtue
of solitude. The power of life comes from within. I go there, pray meditate
reach for those luminous places in myself where, for most part of my life, I
had been a stranger.
Given a choice, few people would pickup solitude as a
permanent state; nor would I.
I realize, all of us are solitaries even when we are living
in a house of people. Everyone is born alone; finds the meaning of his life
alone; goes to his death alone. The most important thing we can do is to arn
to live to ourselves with courage, humility and beauty.