Smart Solitude
Solitude is vital, loneliness is destructive. Let’s talk about the difference.
Smart Summary
There’s a big difference between the solace of being in solitude – the ability to wind down from daily demands and distractions, vs just being alone.
Being alone doesn’t lead to helping us develop healthy mental habits, but a habit of solitude does!
Here’s the SMARTLife path to healthy solitude:
Solace
What do we mean? This probably isn’t a familiar word. It means to give comfort to, to alleviate anxiety. To comfort grief. Solitude is the “quality or state of being alone.” I love that distinction of the quality of being alone. That’s perfect for understanding smart solitude. The goal of solitude isn’t just to be alone. Especially being alone to hide out or avoid something or someone – that’s not good. Figuring out how to cultivate a quality or being alone is to make space for solace. It’s more important that it’s mental space than physical space, but it’s great if you can put them both together.
Meditation
One thing you can do with your mental space in solitude is to meditate. This can mean lots of things with various definitions and cultures, but to help us focus here, I’m referring to filling your mind intentionally with smart stuff. It might start with emptying your mind, like taking out the trash, but make sure you end up intentionally filling your mind with truth. Things like what you’ll find in the Assessment and Reflection sections, more on this in the Truth section.
Assessment
From a place of Solace, make an assessment of where you are at. Not in the “I’m a loser, I’m so far behind. I’m no good” self-condemning way. More like in a “I’m trying to get to somewhere else, so let’s use a map to find directions” kind of way. There’s tons of assessment tools to try, but remember the most important assessment is between you and what you believe you are called to become and do – in that order, please! Become first, then do.
Reflection
We’re often more driven here to a place of reflection wondering “what’s going on? How did that go wrong? What did I do? What did they mean?” and more winding up alone as a result, rather than choosing to come and reflect. However you wind up reflecting, don’t just rehearse what is going wrong. Reflect on your progress. This sounds something like “it used to take me 3 weeks to stop feeling hurt/disappointed/angry, etc. now it only takes a few days until I start to feel better and remember to take time to recover.” Or “I was really offended the last time someone said/did this, I think this time I’ll just forgive and move on.”
Truth
As we cultivate solace, and make progress in meditation and reflection, we have time to determine and filter what we believe is truth. We get better at making choices about what to believe. There’s a lot of “this is my truth” floating around, mostly using the word “truth” as a synonym for “experience”. It’s understandable, but unfortunate. It’s true what you experienced. But is the truth limited to only what we individually experience? I hope not. A big part of the SMARTLife is to discover and use our power of choice. That means selecting from alternatives. If I’m thinking I’m limited to just what I have experienced as the only source of truth, I’m overlooking a lot of other alternatives.
If I’m telling someone else I don’t believe what they think or experience is valid, that’s a problem. The smarter way to seek truth is to acknowledge what we and others have experienced as a true fact, but not to substitute an experience for the truth. It’s helpful and liberating to know that what I have experienced up to this point isn’t the only alternative.
Personally I believe in an external standard of Truth, which is a comforting thought that there’s a higher set of alternatives that I can aspire to understand and apply to whatever my situation and current experience is. The flip side is the more we believe in a standard of Truth, the fewer things we can include as we choose the definition, including our own experiences.
The DUMB choices we sometimes make set us up to substitute healthy solitude for these not smart options:
Distraction
Does anyone need me to point out or define the zillion options available to distract us? Just think about your recent choices for what’s filling up the time you could be spending enjoying the benefits of finding solace through solitude.
Un-attachement
At some point you concluded “it’s just not worth it”, “it’s too hard” and you choose to just “unattach” (I think the official word is actually “detach”) and go it alone. It’s true that being and remaining attached to your purpose, people, and passion is less comfortable, much harder. Living unattached is easier, but living without connection and not providing benefit to others – that’s not SMART.
Making Comparisons
Assessing who we are and what skills we can develop is great. You can find some assessments in the Smart Stuff. But using that information to create a comparison to someone else – that’s not SMART.
Becoming Someone Else
Yikes! We don’t need another copycat or fake online personality. We need the beautiful, powerful, unique, capable you. Use the SMART ideas here and the SMART Stuff tools to find the real you, and share it with us – please!
