Solitude

In order to complete a college degree, especially if you're a single adult, you have to be able to adjust to a lot of time spent alone. For hours on end, it will be just you, a book, and a computer. You have to make that commitment to spend the time, even with the boring classes, in order to get to the goal, that degree that will open up some major new doors.

In the meantime, you're going to pass up on a lot of things that used to be important to you: Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, start-to-finish coverage of the Masters, the Superbowl, whatever. You won't be going out to drinks and dinner with your buddies nearly so often. It may even happen that while everyone else in the family goes sight-seeing during winter vacation, you stay back at the motel room, reading and taking notes for the paper that's due the first week of school.

This can be hard for a lot of people. Skipping a birthday party can make you unpopular with some family members, who may not readily understand what's going on. I had an advantage: I had to move to enroll in school, so most people can't just drop by for dinner any more: my friends mostly live over 60 miles away. Plus, because I'm in school full time, and looking for a part-time job, I haven't had any time to meet new people away from campus.

Yes, it gets a little lonely. Going to school later in life isn't for everyone. On the other hand, by studying hard, staying with the books, and focusing on something a little more lasting than America's Got Talent, it can feel like you're joining something eternal.

Think back to all the scholars in the world who studied night after night, trying to understand the world around them. Bacon, Aquinas, Carroll, and a long parade of others, both legendary and unknown, confronted solitude and learned to live with it, in order to reach out to new fields of knowledge and conquer them. They studied through Whitman's "transparent night," and tried not to suffer from their aloneness.

I've become familiar with solitude, although I can't say it's my friend. It doesn't even like me, but I'm learning to turn it to my advantage. At times I even consider it a resource -- a quiet, calm place in the soul and in the home away from the noisy insanity of urban life. While I'm not about to become an anchoress, it's clear that solitude can help the mind and the spirit focus on what's real.

You may not ever become Albert Schweitzer, or even Douglas Adams, but if you have the chance to study, even if it means spending more time in solitude than you'd like, do it. The chance may not come again, and you may discover dimensions of solitude you might never otherwise recognize.