sitting quietly in a room alone

The morning rush hour is back. Now that Working From Home is no longer the default, people are heading back to their offices with a vengeance. The traffic jams are back, as are the jam-packed MRTs. I wonder if anyone actually misses any of this. 

It’s become a truism that the pandemic has generally been kinder to introverts than to extroverts. For those of us used to doing things on our own – whether by necessity or by choice – the fact that the rest of the world found itself having to adjust themselves to our more sedate, more solitary mode of being was probably … well … not entirely unsatisfactory. It probably made us feel -- ironically -- less alone. 

‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ I wonder what prompted Blaise Pascal to write that. What had he gone through to arrive at this insight? 

About 300 years later, Siegfried Sassoon had this to say about being alone:

Alone ... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown. 

Those who have come out the other side of silence and solitude emerge different. Changed. Whether in a positive or negative direction. I think the ones who deal well with it – whether through religious means or perhaps via meditation, philosophy, or some sort of spiritual-but-non-religious practice – do arrive at a clearer understanding of themselves. A deeper capacity to tune in to the essential, and choose what is truly important. 

I think it’s a useful exercise, sitting quietly in a room alone, just once in a while. Or, if not a room, then perhaps some outdoor space, out in nature, with no other people around. And better to do so by choice, from a position of strength, than to wait for life to force one’s hand through some terrible and unwanted circumstance, somewhere down the road.