It's Okay to Spend Time Alone - Taoism - Life Wisdom #61

For most people, what arrives is a faint chill, a picture of an empty flat.

table set for one, a phone that has not rung, the feeling of being left out of something happening elsewhere.

Alone has become a word for lack, a word we say with a small downward turn at the end, a condition to be corrected as quickly as possible.

It did not begin that way because the word is a contraction.

And if you pull it apart, you find two older words pressed together over centuries of speech, all in one.

so that to be alone once meant to be all one, not lacking or left out or missing anyone, but entire, whole, complete in yourself.

When our ancestors said a person was alone, they were not saying that something was absent.

They were saying that for a moment, nothing was divided.

And it is worth pausing on how strange it is that a word should travel that far.

from wholeness to lack, because words do not change meaning by accident.

They change when the thing they described stops happening often enough for people to remember it.

Somewhere along the way, the experience of being gathered into a single undivided self became rare enough that the word lost its footing and slid and came to rest on the only nearby thing people still recognized, which was the absence of company.

We kept the sound and lost the meaning.

And now we say alone and feel cold and have no word left for the warm thing it used to name.

Except that the old meaning is not entirely gone and you can still hear it if you listen to a small child.

Watch a three-year-old take a spoon out of an adult's hand and say with total seriousness that she wants to do it alone.

And notice that there is nothing sad in the word at all.

She's not describing an absence of company, since the adult is right there and she is glad of it.

She's describing a completeness, a sufficiency, the discovery that she is enough to do this thing without being propped up.

The word arrives in her mouth exactly as it arrived in the mouths of people 800 years ago, meaning all one, entire, abled.

Somewhere between that spoon and adulthood, the word turns over, and we begin to say it with the chill in it, and I do not think we notice the day it happens.

I want to hold that older meaning up against the life most of us now live, because the gap between the two is where we are living.