An Unlonely Number

Our greatest accomplishments require time alone.  If the young Einstein had been chatting with his buddies on that city trolley around a century ago, we still might not have the theory of relativity, and E=MC(squared) might be just another meaningless bit of formula that never attached itself to a concept. The Williams sisters have spent a lot of quality time with the ball machine, perfecting those killer shots. St. Augustine, Thoreau, Marx, and even the party boy of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used solitude to think, to dream, and to write ideas that shook the world.

If you're considering going back to school at whatever level, and you fear being cut off from your social life, bear in mind that in order to become the person you really are, you need to spend time with yourself.  That old cliche' about loving yourself is fine, but what real accomplishment requires is that you really know yourself so you can open your heart and your life. Then your true self can been seen in the world around you through your work, not just your voice.

So many people worry about being alone.  They fill their days and nights with movement and casual friends, labor and workmates, hobbies and trips to the gym, the beach, the hardware store, Acapulco, the sushi bar . . . And when they finally get home, they fill the air around them with their music, and the surround sound from the TV and the phone calls to more and more people as they try to fill every hour in the days to come.

Alternatively, why not turn off all the noise? Stop answering the cell phone for two days. No email for a whole weekend. Turn off the stereo and the iPod. Cancel a few social events and put the gardening and hot yoga aside for a while, and just see what you really think. Listen to yourself when you are thinking about something more important than your credit card balance, and get familiar with that voice.

That's the voice you'll hear a lot once you're back in class, because you'll be spending more time alone than you do now, studying, thinking, planning, and executing. Eventually in the educational process, each student discovers that solitude is both a treasure and a key that unlocks even more delights than those noisy people can ever imagine.

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.