No Plans For Solitude
If you don’t plan on passing, continuing or ending life alone,
Understand that loneliness is a consequence and not a cause.
It will be the result of your investment in relationships. How much do you invest in yourself to cultivate the presence of people around you?
There are species that live well alone in nature, but we are definitely not one of them. Loneliness “devours (…) and causes mismatch in our hearts”.
It is feared and may become unavoidable. Being alone, or better, feeling alone is not something that is desired or desired. Loneliness bothers. We are beings with a physical and emotional need to speak, listen, live together. Our identity depends on the other, existing is not enough if it is not visible to another individual’s field of vision.
It is from the proximity of others of our species that we acquire basic skills such as acting. We imitate, we learn, and for that we have to be in a group. We are, at some level, dependent on the reality that comes from the confirmation that the other gives us. Alone we get sick, we miss simple and immense pleasures like talking.
The world today has been faced with too much individualism. In markets we see small portions of eggs, bread and yogurt for sale – everything so that it doesn’t spoil before consumption in a lonely home. In real estate launches, small spaces where one or at most two people will live. A crowd of lonely people walks through the streets carrying this contraption called Smartphone. As a fellow columnist said: “we’re boring” holding this thing. We are alone. Losing each day the ability to relate. We are intolerant. We are preferring solitude!
Loneliness is like walking on the treadmill in an empty and silent room. The seconds pass slowly, we hear only our footsteps. As if life were just walking for survival, because if we stop, we’re going to fall. No grace, no pleasure. Walking to nowhere, without moving.
Nobody plans solitude. There are only those who learn to live with it. Before they start throwing stones – yes – being alone is good yes, it’s nice when you want to read a book, listen to a song. Many want to be alone, but never be alone. We want to be alone for a while, but not forever. Nobody wants to spend life alone.
Perhaps, as Gabo quoted in what is for me his masterpiece, solitude is a contract that we will have to sign in old age, but it is necessary that we have lived and kept memories to support such an end.
I see individualism and the option for solitude as a type of social disease that affects our typical way of behaving. This is not natural to our species, however, without realizing it, we are the protagonists of the distancing. We distance ourselves from each other all the time – not only for the convenience of idealized relationships in the virtual world – we distance ourselves because we are intolerant. We disagree with everything all the time and, at the same time, we only want those who always agree with us. We are completely unwilling to live with differences and we believe that solitude is a better option. Sorry, but it’s not.
The exercise of coexistence with another of our species who, despite being similar, thinks and acts differently, is a basic precept. We are losing the ability to change, to give even a little bit in the name of a relationship, and this will lead to the inevitable loneliness, one that nobody plans and that nobody wants.
Nobody makes plans for solitude, but it is the inevitable consequence of those who abandon the habit of socializing, of those who think being right is more important than being happy, of those who have stones to throw all the time, of those who build walls around them of themselves and give up one of our greatest pleasures as people: not being alone.
