The Strength Of Solitude
Taking pleasure in solitude, I believe, is the greatest strength in a man. All the great men of the past, including warriors and philosophers, spoke highly of their time in solitude. Beautiful creations have emerged from within it.
Today we are too afraid of being alone with our thoughts. Those thoughts scare us. They remind us of our shortcomings, of what we secretly yearn for but are too afraid to confess, even to ourselves. When we are on our own, we finally encounter our deepest desires, and it frightens us to the point of fleeing from them.
It is this discomfort with our thoughts that keeps us from ever having an epiphany, or producing something extraordinary. Even for sustained creation, you need to be alone with yourself. Your thoughts are the product of your own interactions with the world and your interpretation of it.
The fear of your own thoughts primarily arises because our rational mind insists that they are wrong. The moral framework we have constructed for ourselves prevents us from ever truly addressing our desires.
You do not have to fulfil all those desires because most of them are trivial, truth be told. You have to resolve them one by one. You have to trace each back to its source and discover why it exists. A desire is often a symptom of a deeper craving that you are unwilling to acknowledge.
And so it is vital that we address our thoughts, our desires, our anger. If not to resolve them, then at least to confront them. And for that, we must spend time with them rather than flee from them. Why run from something you yourself have created? All your thoughts, fears, biases, and emotions are your own. You are the master of them all.
The difference between solitude and loneliness is the degree of suffering. A person who is tormented by his own thoughts, who struggles to confront them and remains enslaved by his emotions, will feel lonely.
But someone who understands that every thought has a source, every emotion has a cause, every rage is rooted in a desire, and every desire points towards something absent in him, that person is capable of true solitude.
You can only enjoy your own company if you know who you are. Solitude, then, is for someone who has come to understand his own nature.
By understanding, I mean going beyond morality. Beyond contradictions. Beyond right and wrong. Because frankly, when you are confronting yourself, why bother with the moral and the immoral? You can be as honest as you dare.
Once you understand yourself, only then can you accept it. And once there is acceptance, there is peace. It is through this peace that all emotional exploration begins. You start examining the world through the emotions that everybody experiences. Because you have identified those emotions within yourself, you also learn to recognise them in others.
When you can discern emotion and suffering in others as you have in yourself, it becomes easier to understand and empathise with them. You begin seeing the world through a different lens. You start to realise that the world is not cruel but a victim of its own maladies.
It is from this vantage that you gain further depth into your own emotional constitution. You form an understanding of your origins. Why you were the way you were. Solitude triggers a cycle that is symbiotic by nature. You understand yourself and therefore you understand the world. When you understand the world, you also understand how alike everyone truly is.
For an artist, solitude is mandatory. Your mind has to wander for it to bring back something, anything that can make you think. That can help you create. All creation requires silence and an acceptance of self.
And therefore the greatest strength in a man is to tolerate himself. To make sense of his own suffering. And then to create something that monumentalises it.