The quiet weekend

Why would anyone choose to spend a Saturday night at home by themselves? You know, unless they’re some kind of loser.

I live in a city where folk are always doing stuff. Dinners, movies, dancing, drinking; they belong to every night of the week, regardless of having to work the next day.

It’s not just Melbourne.  We all feel the pressure to fill up our time.

If there’s no event in your calendar or pressing task to be done, it implies an opening, an availability to fill.

It doesn’t have to.  The absence of socialising doesn’t make you tragic either.

A lot of the wisdom about solitude suggests that you should learn to be content with your own company.  Without the distractions of people and busy work, you face who you really are and confront the neuroticism of your thoughts.

Seriously.

No wonder extroverts think introverts are nuts, or possible secret psychopaths.

Let me say right now, people who love solitude aren’t preferring their own company. When you choose solitude, you aren’t really keeping to yourself at all.

In solitude, you are with music or the characters in a book.  You muck around with your pet. In solitude you savour the company of wine, cheese and olives. You feel the warm sun or cool moonlight. You take in all the colours and light and the simple comfort of home.

When you sit in silence with the world, raging thoughts slow down and tame.  You are surrounded by fascination and beauty.  You’re in the company of all manner of brilliant things.

Seek solitude, but not to be alone.

Solitude is being in the company of the universe.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― George Gordon Byron