We live in a world that dreads solitude and readily confuses it with abandonment. Yet there is a solitude one chooses: not to flee others, but to find oneself again. It must simply be distinguished from the solitude one endures.
Two solitudes
There is a solitude that weighs and a solitude that frees. The first is endured: it is isolation, the feeling of being cut off, forgotten, kept at a distance. The second is chosen: it is voluntary withdrawal, the step aside we take to recover a little space within.
These two experiences bear the same name, but they have nothing in common. One narrows, the other widens. To confuse them is to deny ourselves an essential need out of fear of an affliction that has nothing to do with it.
To find oneself, not to flee
Chosen solitude is not a flight from others. It is a return to oneself. In the constant noise of demands, screens and expectations, we end up no longer hearing our own voice. We react more than we think; we answer more than we choose.
To withdraw for a moment is not to cut oneself off from the world. It is to regain contact with what we are, beyond others’ gaze and requests. Sometimes we must absent ourselves from others in order to stop being absent from ourselves.
What solitude makes possible
In chosen solitude, something settles. Thoughts arrange themselves, emotions grow clear, decisions ripen. What agitation kept us from seeing appears at last, without effort.
It is also there that most of the things that matter are born: an idea, a project, a work, an inner resolve. Nothing deep is built in dispersion. Solitude is not the enemy of life; it is often its condition.
Returning to others, differently
Chosen solitude is not opposed to relationship: it nourishes it. Those who know how to be alone return to others with more presence, less dependence, a truer word. They no longer seek in the other a remedy for their own emptiness.
For perhaps this is the paradox: we truly meet another only when we no longer need their presence in order to exist. Solitude well lived does not separate us from others; it makes us able to love them without losing ourselves.
To choose solitude, from time to time, is not to withdraw from life. It is to make oneself available again: to oneself first, and thereby to others.
Yannick Costechareyre