It is always about balance. I am currently in process of understanding how not being alone has crippled my ability to really know myself, and how in not really knowing, accepting, and loving myself, I have not truly been able to be present as myself in relationship to anyone else.
Yet, on the other side, we are inherently social. Any "I" is the product of influence of our social experience. I would even go so far as to suggest there actually is no experience of being alone, because we are always a part.
Yet, we need to know our unique shape to know how we fit.
I used to be very afraid of being alone and relying on my own thoughts and intuition because I didn't want to get too "weird."
I think I now have enough self-acceptance to acknowledge I am weird, have always been weird, and any "fitting" has just been an act.
It takes courage to be.
I do think it may be sad to be disconnected from the unity in life. However, I think coupling is just one of the ways to experience our connection beyond ourselves.
This is so interesting as a topic because of what I am currently going through. Thanks!
I felt a bit of synchronicity this morning when the following article showed up in my in box. Given your topic, thought I'd share it here:
Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude,
in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew this when he observed that
“true solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation” — the places where “one’s inner voices become audible.”
But that inner voice, I have found, exists in counterpoise to the outer voice — the more we are tasked with speaking, with orienting lip and ear to the world without, the more difficult it becomes to hear the hum of the world within and feel its magmatic churns of self-knowledge. “Who knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in in her superb
poetic, philosophical, feminist more-than-translation of the Tao te Ching.
Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait
Two and a half millennia after Lao Tzu, and a century before Le Guin and Berry, Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) — another philosopher-poet of the highest order and most timeless hold — addressed the relationship between silence, solitude, and self-knowledge in a portion of his 1923 classic
The Prophet (
public library).
When Gibran’s prophet-protagonist is asked to address the matter of talking, he responds:
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
One of Andrea Dezsö’s
haunting illustrations for the original, uncensored edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence on
the courage necessary for solitude, Gibran’s prophet adds:
There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.
Complement this fragment of the
The Prophet — an abidingly rewarding read in its totality — with sound ecologist Gordon Hempton on
the art of listening in a noisy world and Paul Goodman on
the nine kinds of silence, then revisit Gibran on
the building blocks of true friendship,
the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, and what may be the finest advice ever offered on
parenting and on
the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship.
https://www.brainpickings.org/
. People don't express it in these sorts of terms but unconsciously they are repelled by it and repress it. INxJs occupy this terrifying space and because there are few of us we are almost always isolated to some extent, even in company. 