Flying Solo

When I turned my key in the door, silence greeted me. I had spent the morning at two intensive tai chi classes, had taken the bus home, climbed up Russian Hill with my weapons bag on my shoulder, and finally the three wooden flights to my apartment. I was weak and hungry, my stomach caved in. I could hardly wait for a bagel to toast, for my sage and cheese omelet to cook! It was winter, the apartment freezing. I turned on the wall heater.

I lifted the phone off the hook to see if it made the tone which meant someone had left me a message. No? This is what it meant to live alone. In my whole life, I had not lived in a place to which I had the only key. In fact, as a kid, we had no keys. The house, in which ten people lived, was never locked.

But now, for a period of about ten years, I was living alone. I didn’t like it. But it was good for me. I found I was still dealing with boundary issues. How much responsibility should one take for another? How much should one’s happiness depend on another? Tai chi taught me to stand in my grid, on my own two feet. Each person got the precise benefit of their own practice. It was said that energy came up from the ground beneath our feet, was directed by the waist and expressed in the hands. In other ways too, I was learning, in middle age, to become the person I was meant to be.

My earnest Saturday morning routine gave way to a luxurious afternoon, in which I wrapped my throbbing legs in a blanket and gave myself up to napping, reading and writing. The low-angled sun made a rectangle on the bed. No one knew what I was doing, or cared. This too was what it meant to live alone. When you live in a house with many people, you often want solitude, time to learn what you yourself think. When you live in great swaths of it, you wish for less. Solitude, in which we can completely integrate our inner and outer worlds, is double-edged.

The chief danger in being alone is letting fictions and fantasies run away with you. Other people are buffers of sanity, delineating the real world. In my case, a job in a top-ranked architectural firm disciplined me most days to what I must do. Conversations with family and friends, old and new, showed me where I might be getting off track. San Francisco itself was mesmerizing at the time. I lived in a thick cultural web which, if not the only wonderful one in the world, was at least good, rich, sustainable.

That year, 1997, after eight years alone, I was getting a handle on it. Partly, I was helped by translations of Rumi poems (The Essential Rumi, the first edition of translations by Coleman Barks had come out in 1995). I read them in the morning and chanted them to myself as I went off to work: “There’s more to want here than money and being famous and bites of roasted meat.” “Stay here, quivering with each moment like a drop of mercury,” “Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold.” Rumi convinced me that each of us has a fountain of love and freshness within us from which to drink, that we needn’t look outside ourselves for happiness.

We experience many things more intensely, such as eating or looking, when alone, unaware of someone else’s influence beside us. Places, thoughts, animals, are all silent companions. We also feel a connection to our deep sources, to the particular attractors which make up our own uniqueness. It may be painful, this unalleviated experience of who we are with relation to the world. But it also makes us fully alive. Whether living alone or with others, we must each look to our source. It doesn’t work to live wholly for someone else. Even your child must eventually separate from you and find his or her own.

The push and pull of the world is thrilling. There is so much to see, do, read, experience! Plus the universe expands. The more people there are, the more the air thickens with ideas, needs, music, and stories. The external world throbs and we open to it as best we can, while protecting our vulnerable selves. We also want attention to ourselves and what we are thinking and doing, for the world to recognize our gifts. This is our adventure, our life.

In the last few years, those of a world-wide pandemic, in which one of the chief ways of working against it has been to lock ourselves down in our homes, many of us have been faced with unwanted solitude, the normal props having been knocked out from under our lives. We have asked ourselves tough questions, cleaned up our living spaces and forged new links with our families, even if virtual. This pruning, rethinking and questioning has surely been welcome, a chance to take stock and move on.

Solitude is also associated with certain times of life. Young people, upon leaving home, seek a time of aloneness while they figure out what their own life will mean. Older people also, especially upon the loss of a spouse, find themselves going it alone. A life shorn of the usual habits, shared responsibilities and confidences is a shock to our whole system. It may take months or years to accept our solitariness and make a new, resilient life.

In my case, the time of flying solo ended and I helped make a vibrant family with Don, my new partner. Don is younger than I, and in the middle of a busy and successful career. Life with him leaves me plenty of time to connect to my source, the fountain of freshness within. When I look back, it seems that the years alone were necessary, if not wanted.