The Importance of Solitude

If women were 'convinced that a day or an hour if solitude was a reasonable ambition, they would find a way attaining it. As it is, they feel so unjustified in their demand that they are to make the attempt.


-ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

I am convinced that when the end of the world comes it will arrive not as two clashing armies on the brink but as a "last straw" : the fax that unravels six months' work in a single sentence, the telephone call that sends us reeling across the room, the seemingly innocent request to perform yet another task. Can we attend one more meeting? Write an additional memo before we leave the office? Bake another batch of cookies? Drive an extra car pool trip this week? Suddenly, without warning, women will rush screaming into the night, leaving men and children shaking their heads in amazement wondering if it was something they said. Always remember, Greta Garbo never declared she wanted to be alone. She said: "I want to be lift alone." There is a significant difference.

I believe that it's essential for busy women, by which I mean all of us, to pause a moment-this moment-to reconsider the entire subject of solitude. Too many of us approach time alone as if it were a frivolous, expend¬able luxury rather than a creative necessity. Why should this be so?

Could it be that by shortchanging ourselves, the only thing impoverished is our inner life? And after all, if the lack doesn't show on the surface, if we can pull it off one more time with smoke and mirrors, why, then, of course it doesn't count. Or does it?

"Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves," Anne Morrow Lindbergh urges us to remember. "The problem is not entirely in finding the room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as this is. The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact the problem is how to feed the soul.