The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a World of Attachment

Love how the author reminds the reader that quiet time helps us learn who we are and allows us to recharge our mental and physical bodies. When one pauses and is honest about how many people live, with a cell phone glued to their ear, or text messaging hundreds of times per hour or day and how so many homes have a tv set in bedrooms and other rooms that are on all the time, is it any wonder people have lost their anchor? And as the author wisely notes all the busyness have made people jack of all trades but masters of none. Or jobs half well done. She also writes of how many in the media have labeled quiet people as misfits or abnormal while others sing the praises of men and women like Jesus, Thoreau, Buddhist monks and cloistered nuns. Or how some people are literally afraid when its quiet. Like someone who has the tv on when home even if they are not watching the tv, because they have it on for the noise. Have had a friend who even admitted that they would like to live a quiet life, but when they tried living with no radio, tv, on it felt so foreign, until they realized that having quietness and solitude was their choice, instead of allowing society to tell them how to live. The author does a wonderful job of sharing the history of solitude and how society was healthier and happier in the past when people discovered the pleasure of working alone and even taking a nap or spending time simply as corny as it sounds, smelling the roses. Like the great writers who didn't have computers but wrote their masterpieces that have survived centuries. Or the beautiful quilts one sees that were sewn in solitude and stillness. Or the makers of homemade cheeses, soaps, candles and other heirloom arts that some people these days still make.

This insiteful and feeling missive was given me by a wonderful lady who has been a friend to me over these past 30 odd years. She knows me better, I think, than either of the two wives who are now parts of my history. She presented it to me at one of our impromptu lunchs. This, soon after I had moved into my new dwelling, in the wake of a 21 year marrage. She long knew of my inner need for space, for solitude, for privacy. Dr. Buchholz has most wonderfully rolled all of these into one and given it a name and an identity. "Aloneness" is as sucsinct and possitive a dubbing as I would hope to find. Of course, the term itself is not of the essence. The true value is the use of the term to deliniate as clear and licid a distincion twixt it and 'aloneness', as she has. Although this is a concept stated very early in the volume, and presented as a clearification and basic premmis, I find that it is of great value in and of itself. I thank her for, in this preface, giving voice to a feeling which I could not do, to even my own satisfaction, here-for-to. That is, without feeling of alienation and perceptions of dissappoval and reproach from those I trusted with my thoughts. Most, that is, other than my lunch partner. I could go on, at lenght, about the rest of the offerings of this book, but I think it best that you read it and draw from it what you will. I hope, only, that it is as enriching an experience for you as I found it to be. I suppose that I must add, in the manner of recomendation, the comment that I have made a gift of this volume to several fine folks. Those I considered, if you will, my kindred in this relhm of 'Aloneness'. To a one, the thanks were the essence.