deprivation......................

 

Solitude Deprivation:  A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Out walking.......................

 When the cacophony of market doom reaches ear-piercing levels, the best remedy is to go outside and take a walk—by yourself.

-Tony Isola, from here

alone but not lonely............

 . . . when I’m walking or biking, I don’t consider being alone with my own thoughts to be a waste of time.

-Arnold Kling, from here  

reveries..................

Jozef Israels    Oil on Canvass  circa 1870s

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

-Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories 

artwork via

Lessons from......................

...........................Major Dick Winters: 

Even if you’re an older man, who never had the chance to try-out a period of full-on monk mode and now finds himself enmeshed in mature responsibilities, you can, and should, draw from the way of the monastic warrior. Find ways to periodically escape from the noise and distractions of the world to find solitude and “sharpen your saw.” Whether it’s a lonely morning run, an evening meditation, or a solo camping trip, such solitary retreats will clear your mind, rejuvenate your body, and leave you prepared to face life’s battles with heart and strength.

-via

the extraordinary.................

      No one has yet made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not.  Still, there are indications.  Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen.  It likes the out-of-doors.  It likes the concentrating mind.  It likes solitude.  It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker.  It isn't that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place.  Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

On connection and solitude............

The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist:  "I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone.  Now what that X represents I don't really know . . . but it's a substantial ratio."

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

About all this connectivity.......

Solitude Deprivation:

         A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with
         your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.  

. . . this prioritization of communication over reflection becomes a source of serious concern.  For one thing, when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you:  the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.  If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.

-Cal Newport,  Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Arduous...........................

     What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.  This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.  It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better that you know it.  It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion;  it is easy in solitude to live after our own;  but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as culled from his Essay On Self-Reliance

Rare..................................

via

I thought this was the purpose of blogging....

"Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do."

-as culled from here, with an assist from here

On solitude............................................

"I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."


-Albert Einstein

Trodden............................

There is no short-cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom.  After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

-Mary Ann Evans

On solitude...........................................

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.  But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo via