Solitude is Not the Same As Loneliness

Inspirations from Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

Another crazy week in which I am inspiring myself — and now, hope to inspire you — with Rilke.

Before I launch into that, I want to share with you some thoughts on last week’s post on affordability and (self)worth. My friend

Jeannie Ewing

raised an important point in the comment section that I want to highlight here: It is incredibly hard to keep all the balls in the air without a support system. You know the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Well, it really does. Yet most of us are doing this solo. Even if you are fortunate enough to be raising children in a loving, supportive partnership, chances are you are doing this with no additional help, unless you have the means to pay for that help. In rare cases, if grandparents happen to live nearby and they are willing, they can lend a helping hand. But where is that “village,” that community?

I am raising my daughters as a single mother and immigrant in Montreal, so my village, if I had one, happens to be far away. I am blessed with good friends and have an amicable relationship with my daughters’ father, but I’ll be the first to admit that I have a real difficulty asking for help. I was raised to think that I was strong enough to do this — and everything else — alone. This message does not only come from my parents, but society. Our modern way of living does not encourage cooperation and community and an environment in which we feel comfortable to reach out and ask for help. Until we crumble. I wrote about this after I lost a close friend to suicide. I am still fighting this impulse of being this bad-ass heroine who can slay all the dragons alone, and am slowly learning to ask for help.

Building a community for me is a passion; a necessity. I know I feel better when I can help a friend, even in the smallest way, and I am always profoundly touched by the kindness that is shown to me.

Rilke writes about solitude and companionship in a way that rings very true to me as a fiercely independent, divorced woman who happens to be also a hopeless romantic. Rilke claims that

We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. But how much better is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it.

Solitude, for me, is not the same as loneliness. I pass many joyful hours in solitude writing and reading. I need these solitary hours like I need air. I am happiest in my creative bubble, uninterrupted. Perhaps because I know that in the afternoon my daughters will be back home and their needs will take over my solitary, creative hours, and my good friends are never too far away. By stark contrast, I’ll admit that the loneliest I have ever felt was in my marriage, when I rarely had a solitary moment to myself and I was lying beside a man who I felt didn’t know me at all.

According to Rilke “a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other a guardian of his solitude.” I love this! It implies trust, it implies respect. Unlike the more common “togetherness between two people” that Rilke warns against as an “impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of its fullest freedom and development.”

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

I must admit that reading about this idea of “living side by side” my whole being exhaled deeply as if to say, ‘YES! This is exactly what I want! A respectful, and not an all-consuming companionship in which we can continue to grow as individuals and as a couple. As Rilke writes:

All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighbouring solitudes […] for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.

These lines were harder to read because Rilke was describing my marriage. Something I described to my husband at the time as “my soul is dying” and he thought I was “too dramatic.”

Ah, but love is hard. Rilke is right. “There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.” But is that a reason to give up on love? Should we settle on something less harder; something as easy as downloading an app onto our phone and give people the fleeting attention we give to a nice pair of shoes we see on line, and maybe decide to buy, maybe not? Or should we replace this outdated thing called monogamy for something more modern, like polyamory?

Each and their own answer (no judgment here!) but as I’ve said here before, I have tremendous amount of admiration for couples who find a way to to grow together, side by side, as guardians of each other’s solitudes. Because I agree with Rilke that “marriage [or a committed companionship] is a new task and a new seriousness, a new challenge to and questioning of the strength and generosity of each partner and a great new danger to both.” Because, “no one in life can help anyone else in life” and we should not be discouraged by this. It means that we have to take full responsibility for our own life, so we don’t hold others accountable for it; so that we can coexist side by side, in our solitude, with generosity and openness, and without expecting the other to “fix” us.

So how does this relate to a sense of community, and our ability to ask for help when needed? I think the solitude that Rilke talks about is not a selfish, egocentric solitude, but a responsible solitude that honours our space from which we can, in a balanced manner reach out and touch others.

Imagine if we all did this inner work: stay in the quiet, often deeply uncomfortable, solitary space of our mind and asked ourselves, critically and honestly, what responsibilities we tend to shift to others in the name of “togetherness,” and how we could take better care of ourselves, and our demons, so we could take better care of the people that we love, and not dump all this garbage on them. Just writing this makes me uncomfortable, which I suppose is a good thing. I have still, and always, so much more to learn. And this journey excites me about life. And dare I say, excites me about love.

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Care to share your thoughts on solitude, loneliness and Rilke’s idea of love as “living side by side”? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

And some happy news to share…

In last week’s post I wrote that

before the universe decides to bestow its trust in you, you have to trust yourself, and trust yourself quite a bit — to the point of being stubbornly hopeful.

This has been true to so many risky decisions I have made in my life. Including the most recent one to invest in a poetry workshop with one of my favourite poets (Kim Addonizio) in Italy. The day after I had decided to go for it, I received a grant from The Canada Council for the Arts that will cover my expenses. So I am besides myself with joy and incredibly grateful.

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