Suzanne Askham

How to feel happy with solitude

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone.” (Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

In June my meditation groups will be focusing on solitude. This is an edgy word: too similar to loneliness for some tastes. Yet, as countless creative people have found, something happens when you face up to silence and emptiness. If there is another way to write a book, a poem or a dissertation, I don’t know it.

I have travelled on my own, a little. At first I found it the loneliest thing. Like an orphan abroad, I kept looking for others who would see me in some role or other in relation to them. I was so used to being a partner, parent, daughter, colleague, friend. But in my travelling I had no role, beyond that of a stranger passing through.

Thank goodness, somewhere along the way there was a tiny ‘click’ in my awareness. I realised that solitude was never to be viewed in relation to absent people. It was a rich, full activity in itself. Then the emptiness of the moment became filled with insights. My mind was energised and I felt happy again.

Meditation, of course, is a way of reaching the infinite through solitude. But so is travelling, gardening, walking, running, swimming, even sitting in a café writing that book or dissertation. When you reach the point of truly inhabiting solitude, that’s when somehow you connect with the universe in its entirety. And that’s when you’re part of the flow.