Thoughts on Solitude.
April 1st 2020:
I feel like I’m constantly saying or hearing other people say the phrase “I can’t believe that was a year ago” or something else acknowledging the astonishment that follows the passage of time. When my mother says “It feels like you were a baby just yesterday” I’m flooded with nostalgia as my childhood years don’t feel so distant. I’ve been thinking about why that is. Why suddenly it can feel like so much time has just passed us by without even been given a moment to notice each day slipping away. I think this is because we are always in constant motion and feeling the need to fill every second with one activity or the other. We are consumed by school work just to eventually be consumed by a career. We distract ourselves with social media to kill time and to feed our addiction to narcissism. Movies, tv: constant stimulation. That is not to say that there is something wrong with the way we live our lives, but rather that we rarely give ourselves a chance to breathe. Hence why I’m starting to appreciate this forced isolation. This inevitably will pass, and we will go on with our lives as if this was a distant dream. However in the mean time, I’m trying to take the opportunity to look around me. I don’t think I have ever seen the world so still and so silent. Our lives have been put on pause. The past few weeks I have felt like I was contracting every muscle of my body, sitting here with bated breath, waiting for this to end, dreading ever new day. But why? Why not appreciate this break from a non stop life. Why not use this time to do all the things I’ve been wishing to get done. I’m always saying that I that should read more, that I should write more, that I should get better at the guitar, that I should get back into art. So why not do it, and why not now? Why not use this time to create healthy habits. I have to remind myself that it is ok to be alone, it is healthy. Constant motion will just cause my life to quickly slip by. So why not enjoy this little pause? This has also proven to be an unexpected crash course in absolute detachment. Not even the most seemingly stable things are guaranteed, we simply must find new ways to make the most of life.
