SOLITUDE: THE GREATNESS TONIC

 Everyone is able to practice solitude, but only few people venture to actually achieve that feat. Some people generally make the mistake of thinking that a life of solitude has something to do with one’s temperament or other things of that sort. Temperament is temperament; solitude is something entirely different. Solitude is like food. The phlegmatic needs food; the choleric needs food. The melancholic, too, needs food. Everyone needs food, and solitude is more than food to the soul. 

Some people may be more prone to solitude than others. Introverts, for instance, tend to gravitate towards solitude than other people. Even so, it doesn’t matter whether you are an introvert or extrovert; everyone needs that sublime moment of aloneness that boosts the energies of the soul. In fact, it appears that so called extroverts are more in need of the constant practice of solitude than introverts. You can’t interact properly with people if you can’t interact with your own self properly, in the secret. The moment you deepen your connection with yourself, the moment you take out time to know yourself, your connection with people will almost immediately intensify.

But if you get sunk in the ways of this world, you’ll never get to be alone, you’ll never have a taste of that sweet, sublime art called solitude. People are becoming more and more glued to their phones than to their own souls. We sometimes know more about our computers and televisions than about our own soul. Social network, on its part, has worsened the madness. People have become drowned in the puerile act of copying and pasting and endlessly updating posts on nearly everything you can think of. Nothing in their life is private. You can tell what they ate this morning or the colour of their underwear by simply scrolling through their walls. We’re bombarded every second with words upon words, videos, witty quotations, all fragmented, aphorisms here and there, and many other things that endlessly clutter the soul. In the end, we get filled with the world and have nothing left in us that is truly ours.

Life in previous ages may not have been as sophisticated as life today, but, by and large, those who lived in those bygone ages were far more sophisticated, far more intelligent and wiser than we are. We admire most of them today and look upon them as legends, even demigods. It is not so today; at best, we have some brilliant minds, some strange nerds; some crazy guys with some new gadgets. Even the books of today are greatly watered down by modernity and the need for conformity. I have observed, of late, that most works of fiction are basically the same; the authors sound the same; the styles are basically the same; even the contents are in some ways the same. You can hardly separate book A from B. What is the problem, then? The answer is a simple one—we’ve been drowned. Put differently, we’ve been “cloned.”

Some time ago, a young lady made a remark that still sticks to my mind. After spending some time to pour out her discontent for contemporary philosophy and works of fiction, compared to the works of previous ages, she said, “no one in our time can be as great as those great men, no matter how much that person tries.” Now, she had a point there, but she was wrong, nevertheless. People are not great simply because they don’t want to. It is true that we are currently surrounded by energy drainers, still, we can choose to retain our inner energies and ascend the heights of greatness.

We are so glued to technology to the extent that we’ve forgotten what it means to be human. The great men we now admire, we must note, lived in times when there were no televisions or radios. Books were their televisions and the woods their internet. They had no electricity, but hey were far more energetic than contemporary folks. We may be tempted to think of their lives as tedious and boring, but it wasn’t so at all. Their lives were perhaps far more interesting than our present little lives.

Have you ever ventured to read Milton? Have you bent to notice the preternatural intelligence and energy in the works of Voltaire, Emerson, Aquinas, or Hegel? Can you compare the wit of Aristotle or Emmanuel Kant with that of our contemporary thinkers?  The difference is very clear, isn’t? But how did these ones get there? How did they rise so high? They did what we, in this age, are not doing frequently. They spent time to drink the tonic of solitude, and their lives were forever transformed. You, too, can join the procession. You can ascend the ladder of greatness.You can change from a mediocre to a genius.