When the lights went out!

Just yesterday, as my day in the office came to an end, I started to refocus on my writing; I shuffled and stacked to clear the space. With my screen glaring, I opened a new browser window, headed for Youtube and Mozart, and the conditions for creativity were set. I should also say that, most unusually, I was entirely on my own and would be for some hours. This precious space was a goldmine. I could not waste the opportunity.

And then, the lights went out. Not with the ominous wind-down noise of the millennium falcon just before making the jump to light speed, but simply with a wink. It was gone. As an illuminated night sky flickered and danced through the sliver of my office window, I saw the culprit of my darkness, previously unobserved due to the glare. Not to be deterred, I wandered around in search of light. I found three delightfully misshaped candles. I lit them, grabbed my pencil and notebook; careful not to singe my hair, I repositioned myself to make the most of my frolicking glow.

Solitariness often receives a bad rap. Despite our belief in individualism, we are uncomfortable with people who declare their allegiance to solitude, perceiving it as contrary to our nature as social animals. They are often seen as outliers: misanthropic, mad, bad or sad.

Our willing servitude to digital devices is largely responsible for driving out solitude. Captive to the shimmering seduction of our screens, to cursors pointing the way to limitless entertainment, a tsunami of opinion, we often choose to exist in a reactive rather than generative state. Whilst it might satisfy the sense that to be doing something is better than doing nothing, we are duped into a world where we find it increasingly difficult to occupy our own selves. Constant connectivity satisfies the desire to be occupied, but it erodes our ability to access our inner aptitudes and capacities.

Our cultural preoccupation with busyness and productivity is related to our obsession with Time. The verbs we commonly attach to the noun reveal our anxiety about Time’s passage: spending, saving, wasting, losing, killing.

A dear friend introduced me to W.H. Auden some years ago. Her favourite poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening” describes a conversation between Love and Time as they discuss the power of love to conquer eternity. The speaker, walking down to the river one evening, overhears two lovers pledging their undying devotion to each other. Just as their promises reach the peak of melodrama, the clocks around the city begin to chime, interrupting the two. My friend’s favourite stanza:

'O plunge your hands in water, 

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

  And wonder what you've missed.

Auden’s speaker was saying that this interruption by the clock is a way of reminding us we are mortal creatures, unable to transcend Time. It seems to me, in our modern rush to be occupied, we have most astonishingly traded Auden's version of mortality for even less. Where Auden laments the passing of Time as the speaker takes a stroll down the river, my teenage daughter would envisage such an experience as torture of the sensory deprivation kind. Her sense of ‘wonder[ing] at what she has missed’ is counted in minutes and seconds, rather than hours, months or years. Nevertheless, no matter your unit of measure, if you feel the same lamentation as Auden in your inability to transcend Time, then I have a suggestion for you. 

Whilst I am not denying our mortality in all of its capriciousness, I would say to both you and Auden’s speaker, that you can indeed transcend Time!

When we experience solitude, as I am right now, the regularity of the master clock as we have come to know it is nothing more than a shill. A master trickster who contends to be both supreme authority and instrument for governing such a precious resource. However, when we are solitary, the master clock can be suspended; we enter a different temporal space in which Time loses its tick. Experiencing an open-ended spaciousness, we can be more receptive to alternative imaginings, particularly if we experience silence in solitude.

Despite the attempts of self-help gurus to guide and instrumentalise solitude, it isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s being oneself in an unbounded, unscrutinised zone of radical freedom. Freedom from having to respond to the jangling world, and freedom to roam in the limitless landscape of our own imaginative universe.

I sat there, with only my notebook, and nothing outside of my thoughts and the motion of my writing. It was peaceful, I was delightfully content, and my world was filled with enchantment.