Living alone can, as I understand it, be joyful for some, while disconcerting and unpleasant for others. As I have aged, I find myself alone more often than I am with others or in contact with others on a frequent basis. What is the mindset that most often occurs while I am alone? I have discovered that mindset to be a combination of several emotions and reactions.
I had never lived alone until I experienced a divorce when I was in my early 50’s. When I moved into an apartment that was located on a creek that ran through Dallas, the view from my apartment was filled with the trees that bordered the creek. The creek ran adjacent to the sidewalk that led to my first floor apartment. I relished the layers of green and the fall colors as the seasons slipped by. I found peace in that apartment. In addition, I found that I had accumulated decades of avoiding loneliness. I also discovered that I had missed developing a sense of self-analysis that informed me of what was important to me and what I had previously valued as important in order to co-exist with other people who were constantly in close proximity. Until I lived alone, I had never really understood those parts of myself that I like and those that I did not like as much.
During the early years of living alone, I realized that I could become angry or frustrated by some of the cicumstances of daily life that visit most of us. I had time, in the quiet that defined life in my green-filled apartment views, to realize that anger and frustration were not pleaant and needed to be controlled. I created an experiment in which I began to time my unpleasant emotions (anger or frustration) with the stop watch function on my cell phone. When I began this experiment, my negative emotions lasted from perhaps an hour to several hours and, occasionally, until the next day. During these periods of time, the negative emotion du jour subsided as the clock ticked. By living alone, I had the opportunity to experience various full cycles of recovery from negative emotions and realized that I was, through time, controlling my negative emotions by choosing the put myself in alternate states-of-mind that overcame the negative emotions and replaced them with positive states-of-mind. I was “flipping a switch” in my brain through choice. Over a relatively short span of time, a week, then hours, then a few minutes, eventually to mere seconds…by the clock, I taught myself to very rapidly find that peace and tranquility that I had originally experienced as a result of green trees and being alone.
Most of us, as we age, have or will experience living alone. When that occurs, it provides for us a new way of experiencing ourselves with little or no distractions. When we are alone, we realize that there are thousands of others in our world that are also alone and that we all have the choice of living in a world of loneliness or experiencing a new and exciting world within ourselves in which we learn to choose peace, tranquility and freedom from frustration and anger. Through this process of self-discovery, we are able to find joy within ourselves and, simultaneously, developing the ability to reach out to others, in person or by electronic means, with an attitude that invites them into our world in a positive, empathetic and welcoming way. Through the process of self-analysis, we learn about self- discovery. Through the choice that we make to mentally “flip the switch”, alone is not necessarily alone.
bill@safeharborpathways.com
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