Solitude
In a class I'm taking for the Honors Floor, we were told to go do nothing for an hour and then write about it. The following is my response.
I am not one of those for whom this was an inherently uncomfortable experience. This is far from the first time I have sat in a tree for an hour praying and thinking and sinking into peace. I almost always spend times like these in trees, because something about trees – whether simply my past experience and memory or something more concrete and objective – makes me understand my connection to the Universe and to God and to Love and Peace in ways that I never understand in other situations. It's strange to describe it in this way, because my governing tendency is not to be mystical about things.
Because it wasn't a weird experience in and of itself, most of what made this experience unique for me was that I felt the constant need to be evaluating the content of my thoughts to make sure that it wouldn't make people feel uncomfortable once they read it. I didn't succeed entirely, and that's had the effect of this being the third time I've tried to write about it. Even having to play the 3rd person critical voice was uncomfortable to me. It's not that I'm unused to thinking out loud – it's why I started my blog a couple years ago – but I'm not comfortable with that particular space being peered in on by foreigners, because I've tried having that work before and it didn't. So. That portion of the exercise (preparing for writing this and now writing it for the third time) was a bit unnerving, honestly. I was very sleep deprived that day, so my heart-brain-consciousness filter was on extremely low power. I'm not as sleep deprived today, though, and my ability to coherently and appropriately explain my thoughts seems better than before.
Much of the content going through my head had to do with friendship and reputation. Many positive things, many problem things, many neutral things. I'll give one relatively neutral example: I recently found out from a friend that my over-active participation in Capstone (basically one big Prelude class for our whole graduating class) apparently earned me a rather unsavory reputation in the minds of a sizable chunk of my class, and I wasn't at all aware. Having just come from Prelude that afternoon, I found myself wondering whether it was right to be okay with a laissez-faire attitude about my social presentation; whether I'm okay with recreating the social milieu conducive to placing me in that role. It raised a whole internal debate about the ethics of “being yourself” at the expense of others' comfort, and that can have strange and pretty disorienting effects on a sleep-deprived freshman. I'm not quite sure this concern or any of the others like it were resolved clearly, but there's something about processing it in this environment – that heightened awareness of the Spirit of life and love and truth and stability and organic movement and rightness – that yields the most incredible sense of peace and understanding. Not a factual, logical understanding, but the kind that makes me feel like this activity has the title it does with reason.
That day was overwhelming. I'm not being lazy or trying to break rules by posting this several days after the fact; it would've been unhealthy for me to do it immediately. There were several times when a wave of anxiety or fear would pass through me and it would just seem on the point of explosion, but this day in particular, it was strange how potently the presence of the Spirit would very suddenly blow it away, both figuratively and literally. The sense of unity and extra-personal understanding (despite my severely slighted intellectual capabilities) that would wash over me, or the huge gust of wind that would come up just as I thought I'd run into a completely unsolvable issue, literally causing me to forget whatever I'd been thinking about... The beauty of the wind on the sun on the leaves on the branches lead to a sense of universal cohesion that lends to the spirit that was profound. Several times, I found myself in a place where my “breath was taken away,” so to speak; as if I'd lost the ability to utter any kind of intellectual or emotional or spiritual sound, and all was completely still for several minutes. Once again, that sounds very mystical for my general approach to things, but my experience in trees is (and has always been) peculiar.
I've learned not to expect anything of these types of outings and not to ever make it an activity or ritual. There's no point in it that way. I very intentionally did not do a separate “solitary” activity for this class from what I normally do anyways, because part of the way I've begun to resolve my debate about the ethics of social authenticity is that every community deserves its own shot. Every group deserves its own shot. This particular assignment is situated within an Honors community and is begging for openness and honesty and diversity of experience, and that differs greatly from the dynamic of the average group conversation. I've also decided that there is a comfortably-discernible difference between unrestrained brain vomit and honest reflection. The full story or full thought or full set of questions might not be completely beneficial for a community to hear, but it is against my nature to spin a web of contrived social interactions. Given that my experience is as it is, I couldn't bear to write this on some canned experience I made up to finish the assignment. Would I have wanted a student to do that if I were in an instructor's position? Would I ever be willing to tell a student that they ought to keep their honesty from making others uneasy? No. I might tell them to restrain themselves from saying things they legitimately thought were unsuitable to the discussion, but authenticity would generally take preference in my book over many other values. I am willing to let some people think I'm nothing more than another pretentious intellectual poser if I'm confident that I've done all I can to keep that from being a voice of truth.
I am not one of those for whom this was an inherently uncomfortable experience. This is far from the first time I have sat in a tree for an hour praying and thinking and sinking into peace. I almost always spend times like these in trees, because something about trees – whether simply my past experience and memory or something more concrete and objective – makes me understand my connection to the Universe and to God and to Love and Peace in ways that I never understand in other situations. It's strange to describe it in this way, because my governing tendency is not to be mystical about things.
Because it wasn't a weird experience in and of itself, most of what made this experience unique for me was that I felt the constant need to be evaluating the content of my thoughts to make sure that it wouldn't make people feel uncomfortable once they read it. I didn't succeed entirely, and that's had the effect of this being the third time I've tried to write about it. Even having to play the 3rd person critical voice was uncomfortable to me. It's not that I'm unused to thinking out loud – it's why I started my blog a couple years ago – but I'm not comfortable with that particular space being peered in on by foreigners, because I've tried having that work before and it didn't. So. That portion of the exercise (preparing for writing this and now writing it for the third time) was a bit unnerving, honestly. I was very sleep deprived that day, so my heart-brain-consciousness filter was on extremely low power. I'm not as sleep deprived today, though, and my ability to coherently and appropriately explain my thoughts seems better than before.
Much of the content going through my head had to do with friendship and reputation. Many positive things, many problem things, many neutral things. I'll give one relatively neutral example: I recently found out from a friend that my over-active participation in Capstone (basically one big Prelude class for our whole graduating class) apparently earned me a rather unsavory reputation in the minds of a sizable chunk of my class, and I wasn't at all aware. Having just come from Prelude that afternoon, I found myself wondering whether it was right to be okay with a laissez-faire attitude about my social presentation; whether I'm okay with recreating the social milieu conducive to placing me in that role. It raised a whole internal debate about the ethics of “being yourself” at the expense of others' comfort, and that can have strange and pretty disorienting effects on a sleep-deprived freshman. I'm not quite sure this concern or any of the others like it were resolved clearly, but there's something about processing it in this environment – that heightened awareness of the Spirit of life and love and truth and stability and organic movement and rightness – that yields the most incredible sense of peace and understanding. Not a factual, logical understanding, but the kind that makes me feel like this activity has the title it does with reason.
That day was overwhelming. I'm not being lazy or trying to break rules by posting this several days after the fact; it would've been unhealthy for me to do it immediately. There were several times when a wave of anxiety or fear would pass through me and it would just seem on the point of explosion, but this day in particular, it was strange how potently the presence of the Spirit would very suddenly blow it away, both figuratively and literally. The sense of unity and extra-personal understanding (despite my severely slighted intellectual capabilities) that would wash over me, or the huge gust of wind that would come up just as I thought I'd run into a completely unsolvable issue, literally causing me to forget whatever I'd been thinking about... The beauty of the wind on the sun on the leaves on the branches lead to a sense of universal cohesion that lends to the spirit that was profound. Several times, I found myself in a place where my “breath was taken away,” so to speak; as if I'd lost the ability to utter any kind of intellectual or emotional or spiritual sound, and all was completely still for several minutes. Once again, that sounds very mystical for my general approach to things, but my experience in trees is (and has always been) peculiar.
I've learned not to expect anything of these types of outings and not to ever make it an activity or ritual. There's no point in it that way. I very intentionally did not do a separate “solitary” activity for this class from what I normally do anyways, because part of the way I've begun to resolve my debate about the ethics of social authenticity is that every community deserves its own shot. Every group deserves its own shot. This particular assignment is situated within an Honors community and is begging for openness and honesty and diversity of experience, and that differs greatly from the dynamic of the average group conversation. I've also decided that there is a comfortably-discernible difference between unrestrained brain vomit and honest reflection. The full story or full thought or full set of questions might not be completely beneficial for a community to hear, but it is against my nature to spin a web of contrived social interactions. Given that my experience is as it is, I couldn't bear to write this on some canned experience I made up to finish the assignment. Would I have wanted a student to do that if I were in an instructor's position? Would I ever be willing to tell a student that they ought to keep their honesty from making others uneasy? No. I might tell them to restrain themselves from saying things they legitimately thought were unsuitable to the discussion, but authenticity would generally take preference in my book over many other values. I am willing to let some people think I'm nothing more than another pretentious intellectual poser if I'm confident that I've done all I can to keep that from being a voice of truth.
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