Tag: solitude

What Do You Do When You’re Alone?

“If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.” ― Paulo Coelho

As I thought about it the other day, living alone for the first time in my life has created all kinds of new options and realizations:

  1. Extra time to think about lists of what you can now do while living alone!
  2. It’s okay to walk around without your pants on
  3. You don’t have to make dinner, you can actually eat meals whenever you want, or not at all
  4. Every mess in the house has only one culprit
  5. The TV is okay company, I leave it on, but usually have to watch a program several times to understand what’s going on – I’m not paying enough attention the first time
  6. You never run out of hot water – although I did, had to have the water heater replaced
  7. It’s okay to leave the door open when going to the bathroom
  8. When you’re alone you (with no pets) you do more out loud talking to yourself, at least I do – even in parking lots, at the store and while waiting in line. I have to be more careful though. You can imagine.
  9. There isn’t anyone else who’s going to pick that up
  10. I’m not always certain that what I’m wearing matches

“There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned”
― Stephen Vincent Benét

When the internet and cell phone were introduced into our society, the boundaries between work and home began to fall. We are busier because of technology. It has not liberated us as was promised.

Cell phone addiction strikes at a very young age and even begins to alter your brain. Many of the leading innovators in technology, people who invent Apps for example, won’t let their own children have cell phones!

As we get older, we will spend more of our time alone. But what will we do with this time alone?

I don’t think you’re ever going to make much progress if you don’t consistently spend time alone. But not just in seclusion. Alone and thoughtful about yourself, others and the situation. It’s going to take a long time. Your whole life. But in the noisy chaos that invades each moment, you’ll never find who you really are and what needs to happen until you (1) put down that phone, (2) walk out on the routines that trap you, and (3) unpack all the fear, frustration and dreams that are crammed into your soul.

Come close to God, and God will come close to you.  – James 4:8

Magic Moments

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
― G.K. Chesterton

angel-praying1

My wife is hollering at me (still) because I won’t answer her question (still). She’s holding the SUV door open and trying to get some information from me. I’m listening to a song on the radio. It’s a familiar song with some powerful lyrics that poetically capture my state of being. I’m having a magic moment. I am vaguely aware that there’s this woman yelling at me, trying to get my attention, asking a very simple question over and over and I’m just trying to ignore her hoping I can stay in the magic until the song ends.

“It’s just a song on the radio!” my wife tells me as she marches off to get me something from Starbucks. She’s right. These days I grasp for those magic moments just like I used to reach for that inner tube racing past me while I rode the rapids down the Guadalupe. There may not be another one coming for a while.

“My soul is in the sky” – William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

There is nothing but the mundane all around us every minute. And then something breaks through and there’s a magic moment waiting. That student across the desk last night who needed to hear from someone a word of hope. He has tasted so much failure. His whole life is ahead of him. He thinks what really matters right now is his final exam. But there’s so much more he needs to believe. I engineer a magic moment and there are tears in his eyes as he hears some truth he hadn’t expected.

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.” ― G.K. Chesterton

The phone in my pocket rings and I answer it. That in itself is a magic moment. I don’t like to talk on the phone. It’s usually turned off because I don’t want it ringing in class or meetings. I fight an endless battle with my students who are hopelessly addicted to their phones.

I had just finished signing a stack of legal documents. My mind had been drifting and dreaming about the here and now and days to come. As I walked out the door, my phone call came.

It was a magic moment. A friend from far away in the desert called. He just wanted five or ten minutes. That’s all I had. We talked for about thirty. We caught up a little, laughed and shared some information. It was over before it started. I sat out in the parking lot for most of it. It was one of those timing experiences, when everything seems to fall into place and you look back and wonder, “how did everything I didn’t even know I needed happen just like that?” Magically, a book he had sent and inscribed was in the mailbox the very next day.

“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.” – Henri Nouwen

The Apostle John wrote, “If a person owns the kinds of things we need to make it in the world but refuses to share with those in need, is it even possible that God’s love lives in him?” (I John 3:17, The Voice). In my world one of the most valuable things that people give up is time. These days, one of the things I need “to make it in the world” is a magic moment on the phone out in the parking lot.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”  ― W.B. Yeats

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened…”  – Ephesians 1:18