On Solitude
Solitude is a rare commodity.
No. I do not yearn for empty park benches, or bustle-free platforms, or dimly lit quaint cafés. Nor am I grieving over the lack of log cabins beside placid lakes nestled in a mountain backdrop. A place of idyll to ruminate or plan a weekend getaway. No.
We live in cities for lifeblood. Teeming public transport and snugly built apartments are the norm. These are metropolises that “never sleep”, a euphemism that alludes to the raucous night traffic and the accompanying harsh lights.
I yearn for a different kind of solitude: solitude of the mind.
Again, I assure you, I am not irked by the neighboring cubicle loudly playing a popular number, nor I am by the colleague who dropped china while I was in the middle of decoding the nuances of the Grand Unified Theory.
What befuddles me is the mental traffic, the overpopulated mind-space, the mowed down, deforested creative park of the mind.
This is a genuine concern, which — if we’re to string together algorithm-like sequence of thoughts — we would easily acknowledge. Precisely the train of thoughts we are unable to construct — and therein lies the problem.
I am relatively young to label this world as “modern”, or “today’s”, in the sense used by people who have seen generations pass by. But this symptom of thoughts furiously running hither and yon, branching furiously away from the intended destination is as recent as I can remember.
Wait, do not wander away. Not just yet. Don’t simplify it as distraction.
There is a surplus of information. At our finger-tips, like they promised. The authenticity of this information is another debate. That we can search for what we want from wherever we are is amazing, even after all these years of smartphones and tablets. We’re addicted to stay connected — with people on social media, with celebrities on entertainment networks, with politics on news feeds, with sagas on soap opera, with sports on TV and blogs… We’re desperate to be everywhere at the same time, never physically but always, at least virtually.
You ask, rightfully, what has the above paragraph to do with the topic discussed prior to it? Well, it has everything to do with it: the manner in which we divert our thoughts and also the reason why we do so. Like an expletive hollered in a session of sermons, our reveries are doused by the advent of bits of data, thus making us lose the original track, breaking the original thread to shreds. We are transported to some place anew, then another, and so on.
Example. We start with Trump and his regime’s effects on the world at large — gluing together bitty information we’ve read from the dailies with our imagination — and Bang, we switch to Ivanka and her recent gawking at Justin Trudeau, and Bang, we remember the collage circulated on social media that had Emma Watson, too, gawking at Trudeau, and Bang, we wish somebody would gawk at us thus, and Bang, who the hell is Trudeau…
Lost in this melee is Trump. We track back to the original thought, if we can that is. Even if we do, we’re too tired by now to follow the original thread.
Bang.
Maybe that’s how we are. Maybe that’s how I am. Maybe it’s because we know too much, or too little. Maybe that’s how it is. Maybe that’s how it’ll be.
Bang. Maybe I need a new haircut.
