Solitude is not loneliness. Time and again our spirit beckons us with soft whispering of the spiritual joy one may have experienced. It keeps calling us to a life of peaceful tranquility and simple unpretentious serenity. But we haven’t surrendered our fluttering concerns, our perpetual worries about future losses. These take up all our time daily and when our little day is done there are the comforting arms of slumber. Even a little taste of spiritual joy is a premonition of a higher life, vastly richer, deeply peaceful that we know we are passing by. A serene joyful life as lived by great masters, unfretful and unbullied by daily onslaughts, eludes us. These masters are not recluses or idlers in himalayan caves. They aren’t mooning meditators in deep dark forests. They are of this same sorrowful world, but live it with a smile and a spring in their step!
Why can’t we? Even when we go for a retreat ,we carry along our mad feverish mind with its equally frantic lifestyle. Obsessed with outer distractions we lack our company, our own true selves. We splinter into ten different individuals during a single morning; we are parents ,spouses ,seekers, socialites, householders and professionals, all in one, a begging for that peace which we most value , but least try for.
Solitude, even forced, is a God given opportunity to rethink what one really wants from life. Interior solitude neither fears contacting objects nor fears the company of men. As it seeks not to possess them, nor fears losing them. Solitude can be extremely liberating if you press the ‘delete’ for the past and the future. J Krishnamurti says, “ When there is a dying everyday to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries…..dying everyday so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.” Try.
Prarthna Saran, President Chinmaya Mission Delhi