the hermit card 🪞
“Introspection, Meditation, Self-reflection, Solitude, Soul-searching, Withdrawing from society temporarily.”
Healthy and unhealthy isolation. Anxiety, fear, shame pain and deep helplessness can describe how loneliness can make a soul feel. “Some people can go for a walk or listen to music and feel that they are deeply in touch with themselves. Others cannot.” Many great thinkers have championed the intellectual & spiritual benefits of solitude, Lao Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf, but many modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it.
“Every single time we have a chance to go running we plug in our headphones. Every time we sit in the car we listen to the radio, I mean, my students today tell me they can’t go to the bathroom without their phone on.” - the Atlantic. That is where solitude comes in. Such a separation requires what psychoanalysts refers to as the “capacity to be alone.” You have to have that capacity, the ability to know that you’re going to survive, that you’re going to be okay if you’re not supported by entire group. Put another way, a person who can find a rich self-experience in a solitary state is far less likely to feel lonely when alone.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. Solitude vivifies but isolation kills. There is a different between some time and space out, VS exile, being anti-social, a misfit, sadness and dangerously withdrawing from loved ones. “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” – Einstien. “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalising.” – William S. Boroughs. “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” – Edward Gibbon
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” – Arthur
