The Power of Solitude to Inform Us About Possibility

Tonight I biked twenty miles along the minute-man bike path, starting in early evening. I found myself relishing and enjoying the solitude. When do we get such moments unless forced upon us, or rather when do we relish such moments -when the moment for reflection arises in us, and with overwhelming need, takes advantage of this time to flood the brain, the body with inner reflection. Thoughts would be too simple a word. Ideas too profound. It's more like the self, once a frequent visitor, recognizes itself and takes a cup of tea by the wooded edge and takes in the sunny vale- but here it's night and bugs fly by in haste and make bug jam in my eye. The self is a gauzy cloak, a teary eye in the night lit by a small lamp that softly blinds me with memory while speaking entirely in the present and future.  

Henry David Thoreau seems to have gotten it right when he wrote in his chapter "Solitude" in Walden: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled."

The velvet darkness speaks to me, from within a question emerges. How to express the impossible? Or rather, how to synthesize what is currently impossible into what is possible? At every moment there is possibility, the way there is potential energy in a car battery or a book just peering over the edge of the counter. It occurs to me that the reason people have uncertainty is because at any moment there are a many things with potential that have yet to come into being. We are validated in this feeling. It is both normal and necessary to recognize those moments where uncertainty is so palatable you can taste it - a violin string so tight it reverberates a twang and leaves a cloud of resin dust in its wake. Taste. Hear. Feel. Relish. Relish the moment that you were able to arrive at a moment for reflection, sadness, joy, humor, uncertainty, and even loss. How did we get here? Are we powerless to control what happens to us? We are powerless insofar as we can rarely control the actions of others, but we can often control how those actions affect how we feel. If we let a moment destroy us or allow us to respond in anger or disappointment, it will be that. If we instruct ourselves to work not with what was but with what is and what could be, we can vastly determine how we think about future thoughts. We may not  be able to remove or change existing feelings, but we can change how we choose to interpret new ones.

So, as I continued to fly by during this cool August evening, getting lost in memory and the tight weaving of emotion, it was only the right thing to do. Summer informs us of its end and fall of its beginning. So, why shouldn't other cycles be as natural? Why shouldn't we be able to say goodbye to those we love, the way early fall says goodbye to sultry summer evenings and lake baths pitched in the aroma of lavender and verbena?