If only we looked forward to keeping
company with ourselves the way we anticipate actual company.
We might prepare something special to
eat, or tidy the area where we plan to hang out. We might consider
what activity we'd most enjoy doing on our own.
Instead, we go off alone only when the
tasks we consider important are done, no one needs us urgently, and
we can spare the time. Even those of us who schedule regular times
of meditation or prayer often see solitude as something good for us
rather than times to relish.
Julie Cameron, who wrote The
Artist's Way, a self-help book
aimed at helping adults recover their lost creativity, advised
readers to take an afternoon a week to be alone and play as a child,
swinging on a swing at the park, feeding ducks, kicking rocks or a
ball. She believed this to be crucial for getting in touch with the
younger, true self.
She wrote, “Rather than being taught
to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are,
in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are
brought up in our life as told to us by someone else. When we survey
our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a
dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us
believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have
been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if . . . if
we had known who we really were.”
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