Solitude

Week 7 solitude

By personality and temperament, are you drawn toward being alone or toward being with people?  What does this suggest about your practice of solitude?

So I actually love being alone.  I am definitely an introvert, and I crave solitude and silence.  Having a husband and now two little boys, neither of these things come around very often.  I guess this suggests that solitude is a practice that happens often and easily for me.  To some extent this is very true.  It is not uncommon for me to drive my car in silence, or to have complete silence when I am home by myself.  I am not a person who needs to have noise or people around to feel comfortable.  So naturally solitude is pretty easy for me.  What takes a little more work is making it purposeful and useful.

One aspect of this chapter that is a massive challenge is this idea of speaking less overall and making what I do say count.  This does not come naturally at all.  Even as I was reading the chapter I felt challenged to speak less.  I was not expecting to see that as part of solitude.  Foater never ceases to challenge.