solitude

Connections are difficult. There__ an irritation in being among people who__e already found their connection, and finding that those left who haven__ are just as undesirable as the void they would be replacing. The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by reminders of why that solitude is preferable.

How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

Solitude is very different from a __ime-out_ from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving_ But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.

So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.

The farm is a base of operations__ stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks__hen he __omes to market_ with himself. He learns that he__ got to be almost wastefully alone.

It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way_; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer_: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?

In a lot of ways, living with Charlie was like having my own place, and I found myself reveling in the aloneness instead of being lonely.

Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable__veryone together, sleeping in the dark.''I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna

After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

You are the richest person if you own the treasures of both the solitude and the togetherness!

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

Make time to be still.