Solitude in a Pandemic

I just listened to Krista Tippett’s podcast “on being.”  This interview with Stephen Batchelor,”Finding Ease in Aloneness,” is an excellent tool for me in making sense out of an enforced life in solitude during this covid-19 pandemic.  You might also find it helpful.  Here are two quotes to whet your appetite.

 

 

…solitude is the practice of creating an inward autonomy within ourselves, an inward freedom from the power of these overwhelming thoughts and emotions.

Stephen Batchelor 

 

 

It was totally enforced — 27 years of his life, his most active adult life, in solitude, and yet, he’s the kind of person who, rather than just becoming lonely and depressed, which I suspect would’ve been a very reasonable way of reacting to that incarceration, he saw it as an opportunity. And what he discovers in the silence and the solitude is the power of words and how powerful words are, because this is what he’s been cut off from, is the capacity to be able to speak. And rather than just feel frustrated and limited, he reflects back on how valuable words are in being able to address people’s real needs and concerns. And so he seems to have transformed that imprisonment, at least at one level, into a deeper resource within himself. And I think when he is released from jail, and you hear him speak, there’s a gravity and a maturity and a depth — it almost doesn’t really matter, almost, what he says. There’s something in his tone of voice, something in his whole being that has been nurtured and enriched, it appears, from this long period of enforced solitude and reflection.

This is Mandela. He says: “It is never my custom to use words lightly. If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact upon the way people live and die.”

Stephen Batchelor

Listen here.

Another video essay:

 

 

Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/s/photos/solitude