It is late hour in a city like Lahore, outside the world is a symphony of companionship. The sounds are the sounds of contact: the roar of motorcycles full of friends the mutters of families sitting on rooftops, the far off, regular rhythm of a dhol at a marriage party. the air itself is bloody with collective being. It is here, so very tenuously and aggressively social, that a state of lonely solitude can seem a hefty and extreme gesture. And we are all part of the paradoxical network; tied together to a web of friends and strangers all around the world- and we have never been more afraid of what silence comes when the screens become black. We cram our care-free time full of podcasts, playlists, and endless scrolling in a desperate push not to come face to face with the one thing we cannot escape, which is, coming face to face with ourselves. It is perhaps the most difficult and the most necessary pilgrimage that a human can make is this learning how to be in the silence and the state of being alone, in solitude, and in that unmediated space, the person alone with him- or herself as the only entity.
To the majority of us, this is not an encounter that we welcome in the beginning. Initial phase of sublime loneliness is usually attained with a roar of inner silence. Once all the other internal interference is removed we are left in an empty echo chamber of our own thoughts and the voice that tends to ring the most is the voice that criticizes us. It is a voice that is comprised of former miscarriages, of snide comments of other people, of impossibility implanted by society. It re-shows us ever-so-humiliating moments of our lives, interrogates our every move and tells us that we will fail. And with it is associated an intense agitation as of a persons being all full of a spirit of alacrity to have something to do. There is a desperate urge to do something-, check my phone, turn on the TV, call somebody- anything as long as it is not being. This stress is induced by a terrible fact, which is that a lot of our identity is constructed out. We look to the face of our friends, of family, and of colleagues and see ourselves in mirror. Their laugh increases our humour, their compliment show us our intelligence, their company assures our being. Once these mirrors are taken away we start perceiving ourselves face to face, without filters or validation, and it is common not so much to recognize, but to like the new stranger at all.
Provided we can resist this first tempest of pain something wonderful starts to occur. The feverish activity dies and a new and more subdued period sets in. It is the start of a true talking with the self. You begin to unravel the cacophony of voices within the head, not to identify them with a single, insistent, chairman-of-the-board-type, at all but with various elements within your own difficult personal past. You are led to learn how to watch the inner critic but not to fully believe what he/she says. You view it as what it is: a guarded, scared mechanism, a very small section of yourself (in an extremely misadaptive way) attempting to protect you against harm in the future by reminding you of the pain of the past. When you simply watch it with a detached sense of curiosity you rob it of any authority. It is only one voice among others and this voice is not the gospel truth. In this new silence there arise other gentler voices. The voice of your inner child, the side of you who contains both your oldest wounds, a but also carries with you your own sense of wonder, an innate curiosity and a sense of joy may start talking to you. Being alone carves the secure silence to open himself/herself to that side of the self, to comprehend his/her inner emotional scenery and the roots of his/her darkest horrors and longings.
As you continue practicing and learning how to counsel the child and silence the voice of the critic, a third voice appears. That is the voice of the inner sage, while it is the silent, gut wisdom adviser within. This is your whole aspect that is in touch with your soul core and to which you better know what is good to you yourself, not the social pressure and not the fear-based programming. Here is your guide to the Bait and Switch. The end of solitude is to develop a relationship towards this inner voice. It is the procedure of cultivating a friendship with your wisdom. You are taught that whenever you have a problem you take it, not to the hysterical conversation of the outside world, but to the still council of thyself, and thine own answer thou shalt believe. It is during these times that loneliness stops being regarded as an ordeal that one has to bear but as an essentially important means of self-discovery and direction. It is no longer a blank place to be dreaded, but fertile land to expand.
The fruit of this inner voyage does not simply stay within the inner world; rather, in the form of an increased ability and confidence in the involvement of the external world. The clearness of mind in solitude results in a radical and effective decision-making. Once you have taken the effort to clearly realize your personal values and motivations, you no longer become an easy prey of external opinions of other people. The instinctive compass that helps you makes decisions, including minor daily to large life direction choices, develops a solid level of internal bearing. Instead of wasting your time racking your brains on what you should do, you do what you know is correct to do. This is combined with a great sense of emotional strength. As you learn how to sit with your own challenging feelings, loneliness, boredom, sadness, anxiety, and to resist the temptation to reach out for some kind of distraction, you learn that you can survive it. What you develop is an emotional tolerance. Your triggers no longer have the same intensity at which they used to leave you seeking external validation. This will make you less terrified in facing challenges in life, more mature about its relationships, and more consistent in your pursuits.
Besides, solitude is the key element of the genuine creativity. Empty space is required of the human mind to form new shots. When in a permanent state of responding to incoming stimuli, it is in a constant state of low-level panic and can be prevented to enter its lower, more associative levels of thoughts. Loneliness is the barren land that ideas can grow. It permits unstructured daydreaming, mindless wandering of the mind, the state so frequently antecedent to a flash of interest or a solution to a difficult, as well as, to a creative problem. Artist, engineer, parent, business owner all have a super power in a noise-addicted world, to be able to step into your own alone space and tap this well-spring of ideas.
Such profound and lasting friendship with self is also a revolution in terms of relationships with other people. It is the final remedy to being needy. When you are able to like yourself, you are no longer going into social interactions with a desperate unconscious attempting to get a validation or form of entertainment. You relate with others out of abundance, and not out of deprivation. You are there because you want to be and not because you have to. That at once creates healthier, balanced dynamics. You would not accept the relationships which are exhausting or abusive as much anymore due to fear of the alternative being lost. It is no longer dangerous to be alone and so you can be more selective in who you incorporate in your life. The friendships and relationships that you do, become closer and significant. Since you do not use other people in order to get out of your own space, you can get to know and perceive other people in their actual image and identify with them. You are a better listener not coz you cannot wait to listen to another person talk so that you can affirm that you exist.
Having gone through the process of fighting with your own inner critic, you are also becoming very empathic about inner processes of other people. Your fears and insecurities play out in them the same way you personally know it so well in yourself. This will make you a kinder, and less judgmental friend, romantic, and workmate. You know that their prickly or defensive nature, which is also sometimes the case, is probably the result of an inner buoyancy, and you can treat them kindly as opposed to being reactive. The fact that you struggled alone will enable you to accompany other people when they also struggle along their complicated journeys.
Ultimately, this practice does not aim at becoming a hermit and denying the beauty and need of community connections. It is so that one may develop a relationship with himself so powerful, so caring and so dependable, that he or she can then have the relationship with any other person so that this relationship, this foundation, becomes the foundation superior to all the other relationships. It is to help the one friend you never want to quit bonding with to be a good friend who gives good advice and is the pillar of uncompromised strength. This inner companionship is the only proper thing that remains constant in our lives that are always changing with people, places and situations coming and going. It is the foundation which enables you to approach the world with greater involvement, greater courage and less reserve. and as I sit here in the night in Lahore at my window, with the heterophonic music of the city outside my window, the silence in the room is not a emptiness to be dreaded. It is fulness, a silence and a completeness. The of being with good company.
This is not an inactive state of being at all just listen to this serenity, this good company of oneself. It is a live, moving connection, and when once established, it starts educating and transforming all the other parts of your life. It is the solid ground, which one can base a more purposeful and genuine experience. The journey to solitude can be a survival mission, the learning-to-be alone, but the real adventure is the one that follows: the journey to prosper as a solitude, as a person having the inner peace as a kind of guiding star to fight through the storms of the outer world. The initial and most radical change will happen in your attitude toward ambition and understanding of the meaning of success itself. With an inner source of validation being your major score card, you are released of tyranny of external score cards. The crazy, desperate race towards the next promotion, the higher paid position, the titled job, or their acceptance disappears its hold.
It does not mean that ambition dies; it just receives a more genuine version of itself. It is not anymore about the necessity to succeed or show people that you are worthy, but about the desire to live in accordance with the things you have discovered about yourself during that quiet time and activated the attitude to life. Your key question of life changes to what you should do so that you are considered successful. to the question of the necessity to be true to themselves, i.e. to What must I do to be true to myself? The master of this internal scorecard is much more challenging and the long-run more gratifying. It provides you with the depth of existential boldness to abandon things that are traditionally triumphant and yet spiritually degrading. You may quit a well-paid job that doesn t adhere to your morals, you may break up a relationship that seems perfect on the exterior, but empty inside. You can do this simply since you are not afraid of what people would say. What failure means to them does not even matter to you as far as you are comfortable with your version of what a life well-lived is all about. This inner strength is virtually a superpower when parents and the community around are applying seemingly inconceivable pressure in order to do things a certain traditional way and uphold that aspect of family honor with a shared view running so deep it can be taboo to go off the conventional course. It is going to enable you to move between these demands in a gracious way with right-mindedness as far as your community is concerned without compromise to the values concerning your own.
Your place in your physical environment, your sense of place, changes radically as well. Only when the city ceases to help you flee from yourself, you may start finally living in it. In the old days a visit to a busy market would have been an escape into a crowd, noise to deaden your own voice. It then turns into a conversation with your inner peaceful world and the external dynamic world. You even start seeing the things you did not see because when your mind was a buzzing nest of anxiety. you observe the tiled motif of some old fountain, you feel the easy companionship of two tradesmen, you admire the structural beauty of a centenarian balcony. You have been trained into creating an island of a lonely atmosphere in the busiest of locations. The companionship of your inner-self becomes the portable retreat, the bubble of sanity which you can carry to the middle of the beautiful mess that the city can be. Ironically, this trait of peacefully being alone enables you to relate better with the world. You are suddenly open to your senses since they are no longer used as the tool of distraction.
Such internal security transforms the way you treat others with your relationship with other people. After having encountered and reconciled yourself with your unedited self, with your imperfections and contradictions, past etc., you have less of an inclination to show the volume control-curated, hot-conditioned, and ultimately fake version of yourself in the world. Being genuine turns into a default mode not deliberately, but simply because the constantly performed routine of wearing a mask feels unnecessary. You have already become confronted with your ultimate critic, the accusations of your own soul; the criticism of others is not so very frightening. This genuineness is so very charismatic. It allows other individuals to become their true selves when they are in your company, making you the person they can get real with.
This results in the transformed concept of vulnerability. In the past, it would be hard to feel vulnerable as a weakness, as a sign of neediness and willingness to be taken advantage of. At the moment, you realize it as a strength. It is the inner assurance that you can be viewed as you are with the understanding that your basic self worth does not rise or fall on what another believes or does not believe about you. You do not have the fear that your struggles are what you are, because you have already spent time with your struggles alone and you know them as only a component of your story. This enables you to have intimacy in your friendships and associations with partners that you could not have before. When you cease needing a person to rescue you, then you are free to relate in an unaffected, unresentful love to the other for what he or she is; to be loved by that person in a free, nonresentful kind of way; and when we are in that spiritual stance we are ready to enter into any real relationship.
The solitary profound activity also nurtures one with a sense of intellectual autonomy. The contemporary world is a whirlpool of opinions, an undying cyclone of information and dogma through social media, news sources and the circle of friends or acquaintances. It is extremely exhausting to come up with an original thought in this noise. The quiet necessitated by solitude is the kind required to go through and pull down the beliefs you have inherited and the kind that will allow you to question the ideas you have. You can take a belief and trace it down to its root, was it something that your parents taught you, something that you learnt through your culture, something that you took on so as not to stand out. There is room in your head to doubt everything, to read broadly, to think a lot and to come up with your own creation of a personal worldview. This activity produces a more comfortable feeling with grey areas. you are less dogmatic, less sure, less black and white in your thinking, because you have spent enough time in the huge, multiple territory of your own mind to know that simple answers seldom do justice to complex questions. This is intellectual humility and is a sign of wisdom.
Finally, the friendship you form with yourself is not a fixed-achieving metric that is attained and that is it, but a feels alive and breathing relationship that shall be knurtured over your lifetime. It involves upholding a commitment to establishing moments of silence, a commitment to a truthful self-examination and engaging in self compassion. This inner person turns out to be your ultimate direction throughout the surprising course of life. It is this voice which is keen to bring you back on track towards your values when the world wishes to make you get out of track. It is the stable source of support that you can run to when you feel sad or unlucky, a being which can never be deprived of you. It is the font of happiness and surprise that enables to admire a beautiful sunset or ending of a flawlessly made cup of tea with your complete and undoing attention. It happens that the biggest journey is not to turn around the whole world, but to make a journey to the center of yourself. It becomes the greatest success not to gain the applause of the world, but to realize the respect and friendship of the person which you were born with. And as the night of Lahore starts to get darker, the symphony of the citying resumes its diverse expression, and it is not a distraction anymore. It is only the background music that is playing in the backdrop, a beautiful musical score to the peaceful, satisfied, and fulfilling company of self.
