The biggest problem of the human mind is that it can’t stay empty. It needs one goal after the other, one friendship after the other, and one weekend after the other. Destination upon destination, problem upon problem, you get the gist. And that’s the reason why we are scared to do the opposite: solitude.
The habit of being busy has been around from a long time. When the mind is empty, it feels scared and wants to rush back to its basic nature. For instance, if you are a hard worker, sitting idle will make you feel anxious. You will feel like you are wasting your time. I think this is very common but there is more to it: we love to wallow in guilt.
But even if we decide we need a break, we rest or sleep or go for a vacation. That is not an actual break but a change of setting. Our mind is never taking a break. It is busy thinking about where to go next, how much money we need, how to make our life interesting, what should be my next post, how to be thin, how I can exit my boring life/relationships etc.
A true break is not the one that you take to rest your body, it is what you do for your mind. Break from your mundane thoughts that are always running in the background.
Owing to the mind’s conditioning, it finds something negative and makes us believe it is true and relevant. It waters that thought and makes it real. Later, it realizes that there was no problem with the situation but how we thought about it in the first place. For instance – A boy with this kind of mental conditioning in a medical college would do everything to make it unattractive for him.
Once a thought takes over, it doesn’t die by itself so easily. Now, he can’t wait even a bit to leave his studies. But two years back, this is what he wanted to do and most likely two years later he might realize that there was no harm in finishing his studies.
The time we spend with ourselves in solitude is to understand how our mind manipulates us and make a good situation look bad, or vice versa.
Guru Yogi Shivan once shared with me, “If a person cannot sit by themself for 24 minutes a day, then they are not serious about knowing life. If you are serious to know deep questions, you must take out time for yourself.”
SOME BENEFITS OF SOLITUDE
1. CLARITY
Since childhood, we have been taught to do something productive, to keep ourselves engaged in one or another sort of learning. We were never praised for doing nothing.
Everything we did was associated with some sort of urgency. The most asked question was, “What do you do?” or “What’s going on?” Nobody appreciated a reply like, “I just like to sit and do nothing”. It was an unacceptable statement. People always expected solid answers to questions like where we went, what we learned, what we purchased, and how much weight we lost.
We have a short attention span for the most beautiful things in life. But all the irrelevant mental chatter which serves no purpose rather creates more suffering than relief, is given much attention, meaning, and space in our life.
“Don’t sit idle. Do something productive,” – this is the most thought-over sentence.
“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.” – Lao Tzu
2. BETTER DECISION MAKING
Whatever we are seeking is within us. All the answers. No matter how hard we think and try, things will happen at their own pace and time. But we want to push a decision forward or pull back from it as quickly as we can.
We don’t give enough time to observe and truly let it flower from within.
Solitude or sitting alone is a way to balance inflow and outflow of the content of your mind. Miraculous things happen when we don’t hurry to make a decision, we let it happen.
3. PERSONAL or SPIRITUAL GROWTH
Many people complain about anxiety and depression. They try to kill depression with more depression, anxiety with even more anxiety. What they truly need is to listen to their own self. For that mind must be calm and quiet. There must be space to make changes. Space to turn around. Else no matter how hard you try; you will not be able to move.
We give 16 hours a day to our bodies in internment fasting but not even a minute’s break to our mind. Start with just this breath. Take it in as deeply as you can. Drop everything that isn’t you. Again, the break we take isn’t an absolute break. For example, we replace shopping for fattening chocolates with shopping for candies. Our break is again another kind of doing. And at last, doing is an engagement.
Have you dead-stopped yourself to listen to an airplane sound?
To listen to the pouring of tea from the teapot?
To see the water falling out of a tap?
To stop and literally smell the roses.
Our mind finds reason to do easy things. Solitude feels so difficult to grasp. Basically, people are forced into solitude first and then they start to enjoy it. It is easy to write on sand than a rock. When our mind is fluid, unaware like sand it can’t hold anything on it. But when it is like a rock, it can hold even a small mark.
4. LESS DEPENDENCY
We depend a lot on things or people outside of us. We get disturbed quite often when things don’t go our way. We want to change what we don’t like.
What if I tell you we can be as happy as we are with things and people working in our favor, as well also when they do not? For that kind of independence, we must give time to ourselves, to truly understand ourselves.
At the end of our life, we will not remember how much we have collected but we will remember how deeply we have loved everything.
How deeply we have observed a tree?
How deeply have we hugged someone?
How deeply have we shared our heart with a stranger?
How generously have we helped someone in need?
Life is not a destination but series of events unfolding every moment. If you are running marathons inside your head and aren’t present to witness, you might miss it.
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