“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
- Octavio Paz
I’ve decided what I need in life. I need a few moments in solitude ever now and then. For the past few years my memory and abilities of re-collection have elevated to a whole new level. Over the weekend and today I’ve cracked the cause of these powers. I’ve spent a LOT of time in solitude over the past 5 years.
When I was studying away from home, I was often left to my own musings. I’ve always believed that if you like the person you are, you’ll never be miserable alone. Thinking alone, using imagination and recollecting the past has fine tuned my brain to recall small and insignificant memories on a whim. Over the weekend I took the bus to Washinton DC and back and while an hour each way was spent chatting with my cousin sister who was traveling with me, over 6 hours combined were spent looking out the window with my music or just with my thoughts. I thought about everything and nothing at all.
I believe doing the same routine all the time can really create cobwebs in the mind, numb the reflexes and even cause mild depression. My regular life is good so this kind of change really invigorates every pore in me.
I’ve been having random epiphanies (Defination: An epiphany is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something) over the past few weeks about how I want to live my life, what makes me happy, how I can improve myself and stuff like that.
I would suggest we all take some time for ourselves every now and then.
No wonder then that my favorite fictional character of all time is a certain Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He probably said it best in the Sign of Four: “My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
