And yet, solitude offers time for reflection, and unless we're not only meditating, but meditating very skillfully, we will entertain thoughts, some of them just intrusive, others connected to an effort to understand or express something that's important to us. We only seem clinically dangerous if we manifest a running vocalization of those thoughts.
For me, being alone and being in the company of others weave a complementary fabric of life that suits my personality. I am an introvert, and though I like most people and treasure a few, social overload can deplete me. I restore my energy by saying no to the demands of interaction for a while. And it's only when I'm alone that I can reassure myself of my ability to live with myself without the need for constant distraction.
Solitude releases the energy demanded when we focus on others, and gives us a chance to choose where to focus our own attention. Sitting on a log in a wooded area one day, I noticed red maple seedlings in profusion around me. One or two up to my ankle, another up to my waist, another at my shoulder. The large red maple that generated these seedlings shaded most of them, as did nearby oak and hickory trees. So the young trees had little or no chance of growing tall and mature. Nature is prodigal, making more than it needs, extravagantly covering the world with life.
I thought of Loren Eiseley's wonderful essay "How Flowers Changed the World," one of the chapters in his Immense Journey. Eiseley points out the role of angiosperms--flowering plants--in spreading enough biomass on the earth to support large populations of warm-blooded animals, with their (our) high metabolic demands. So the maple saplings around me that day in the woods were part of this revolution in life, along with all the other hardwoods, the grass, wildflowers (including those we classify as "weeds"), and the crops we grow for food.
It's hard to get a chain of associations like that, one starting from a close observation, then tied to reading also done in solitude, at a dinner party.
On the other hand, it makes for a special kind of conversation, one in which people who are interested in you, your direct experiences, and what you make of them may find interesting. I like conversations that allow the weaving in of quiet, distinctive experience to enrich the knowing between and among people. Who are you, I ask my friends, including those I've known for a long time. They often ask me the same thing, and we enrich each other, along the way creating a rich texture in our relationships, a history of having shared the thoughts and feelings generated in our separate experience. I've had chances to tell people why I appreciate goldenrod, and some of them have listened without thinking me terribly idiosyncratic.
Fine conversations, in turn, may feed the reveries of solitude. Taking a quiet walk, a memory of some powerful moment in talk that bound me to a friend brings pleasure, a moment to savor something in life that I've been granted.
The inner life develops in solitude, but it also develops in interaction with others who share their inner lives. We're all richer for the rhythms of interaction that go on both within us and among us.
