Fog on the windows

I ran into an ex at the bar several weeks ago. I imagined myself in her boyfriend's place—as I certainly could have been. Instead of him, I would be thinking about her highly successful bocce league and worrying about whether the conference call had gone through for a talk about expansion. My path was richer—or at least it was a path that I now know was full of marvelous experiences and growth—for having diverged and made the way on my own for just a bit longer.

When I looked in the dictionary for the definition of solitude I found loneliness, which is a subtlety I can't forgive them for missing. The editors should have not have taken it so lightly; the difference is comfort. In the first you can have it, and it in the latter you cannot. Loneliness is associated with unhappiness, unquiet, and ennui. Solitude, on the other hand, can make us stronger and more in touch with the world once we're happy to re-enter it.

It runs in my dad’s side of the family. Always something of a loner, for lack of a better term, he is happy to have met a “social director” that kept him from going too far. We are reminded by a country legend we’re reminded to always travel with others—if you ain’t lovin’ you ain’t livin.’ Indeed, the best of times I have enjoyed in the company of others, and I must heed this rule. But, I am constantly balancing my solitary character with the pleasure of company. When asked whether she feared death (her lover had died in a plane crash on the way to visit her many years before), the legendary French singer Edith Piaf replied: not as much as I fear solitude.

Certainly I don’t fear it—often I seek it out and embrace it—but realize that if we don’t pass time with others, and take time to both love and to lose, we might as well be dead anyway. Passing time with people, whether finding them as I travel or laughing with old friends who live close to home, the company of others is what really forms us and makes us human. Solitude does make us stronger—if we can fend off its quick-encroaching neighbor. Thankfully the "social directors" of life keep us in touch with the rest of the world, but the only way to keep ourselves sane are bouts of solitude once in a while.