Solitude: The Key To Knowing Your Truest Self

Who do we spend the vast majority part of our life with?

When you ask this to yourself, the first set of people you’ll think of are probably your parents, partners, and children.

But there’s one person we spend our entire life with more than anybody else — our own self.

If you give it a thought, we hardly think about sitting in silence, in solitude with our own thoughts.

Do we actually understand the value of silence and solitude?

Honestly, I always considered spending time by myself as a negative experience. From the very beginning, I’ve visualized it to be a boring thing to do. Going out with nobody, how can that be fun? I just didn’t see solitude as an option.

It is nobody’s fault though. We are conditioned to be around people all the time. Most of us grow up, get educated, take up a job, get married and we keep doing our thing for the rest of our lives. We’re constantly around people all the time.

In a world where all you see around us is people having the best time of their lives with a bunch of friends, it isn’t a surprise at all that we have started considering being alone as something negative. We get to spend so little time with our own self that when we actually get some time alone — it feels weird. We don’t know what to do.

Spending time by yourself is not loneliness. This is what I realized over time.

But soon after, I understood how important it is to actually understand the person you are.

Luckily, I’m someone who has always been interested in knowing my original self. This includes knowing my likes, dislikes, my deepest feelings, my mindset, and in order to find this authentic self of mine, I started to throw myself into situations and cultivate habits that act as a catalyst to find out the unknown dimensions that I have.

Listening to music, watching tons of movies, going out for drives and walks by yourself, taking trips are things that throw questions about almost everything at you. Once I understood this, I gradually started doing these activities all by myself. I started enjoying my own company.

But just like any other 21 year old who has just started to figure out what life is, I mostly don’t have answers to all of these questions that I keep asking myself. More often than not, they are just random, broken thoughts. But what this practice does is, is that it starts a dialogue — a dialogue where I’m talking to myself about these questions that in turn help me discover my insecurities, weaknesses, gaps, and strengths in bits and pieces. These things tell me a lot about who I am, where I need to work upon, what career choices I should make, and what parts of myself I’m not able to accept.

Am I a party animal? Do I enjoy nightlife? Do I like reading? Do I like talking to a lot of people and know their life journeys? Do I enjoy watching talk shows? Or movies? If yes, why? Why do I enjoy writing? What does a fun day look like for me? Do I like sticking to a routine? Am I scared to experiment or am I scared to commit to a specific industry?

These are questions that define you, questions that help you discover how you want to shape your future. They tell you what your own ways of life are and they will help you clearly identify what you stand for — what your values and beliefs are. But these questions won’t pop up in your head in the first place when you’re with a bunch of friends all the time.

Spending time alone is the gateway to understanding your true self and this journey of knowing your deep self is a long one. You will not be able to understand all your dimensions in a couple of months or even years and this journey isn’t as smooth as it may seem. It might expose a dark, negative side of yours, it might also teach you about your deepest emotions and feelings you’ve suppressed for a long period of time.

It is true that we need to stick to good friends, have deep relationships, not take the people around us for granted, and constantly add value to the bonds we have. After all, our company defines who we are.

But if you actually think about the company you’re keeping and will keep in the future — the only constant throughout is that of your own. You are your longest friendship.

We need solitude just as much as we need personal relationships — to live healthy and thriving lives.

In terms of making crucial decisions, the more we know our authentic selves the better we can understand if our feelings are based on who we actually are or are originating from someone whom we have been watching on Youtube.

Today, nobody is used to talking to themselves, have experiences with themselves that can in turn make them realize what their authentic self wants. This may sound a little generic but genuinely, there are so many things we don’t like doing but do it only for the people around us, to create a fake perception around our personalities.

To make it all the more difficult, the content on the internet adds so many new layers to us that it is almost impossible to look inwards, dig deeper, and find what it is that is me. I mention social media because it is one of the major reasons we give in to things we don’t like and assume them to be a part of our identities.

For instance, you might actually prefer staying in and watching a movie on weekends over partying but because you constantly see people around you living that life, you might actually start falling into that trap of having company just because you need someone to be around you — doesn’t matter who, why and how well you resonate with that person.

All I’m saying is — you need to be aware of the things you stand for, the things that make you feel good, the things that are actually you.

Spending time to deal with the thoughts that flow while you’re alone will help you make better choices.

All we need to do is start taking tiny steps towards spending time with ourselves and this does not necessarily mean going out for a lavish trip like we see in the movies. Honestly, there are many ways in which we can have some time with ourselves in the day.

Consider these ways to implement solitude in your everyday life:

• Disconnect: Just by turning off your cell phone, your internet you can be more creative, think and do your researches about hobbies and activities that suit your personality.
• Wake up early: Earlier than the rest of the house, earlier than your friends. Spend time thinking about your day and how you can get the most out of It. Make a schedule or a shortlist of what needs to happen.
• Listening: Believe it or not, there are multiple conversations that you have with yourself in the day. You are always watching yourself while you work, talk and act on anything. Becoming more conscious of this, helps you understand your body and mind better.
• Do nothing: Every now and then, get into the habit of doing nothing. Sit down and just listen to your breath or chant something you like for about 10–15 minutes. Doing nothing or meditating is a very effective way to know your deepest feelings.
• Go Solo: Walking, running, working out, journaling, watching movies, singing, reading, and taking short getaway trips are a must.
• Taste and enjoy meals: Try eating in silence. Appreciate whatever it is that you are eating and pay genuine attention to the flavors, tastes, and textures. This is also a great way to practice gratitude.

Silence and solitude require courage and perseverance. In order to enjoy our own company, we need to do all of this with an open mind and define nothing for ourselves.

When we live in a world that is endlessly telling us what to eat and wear, where to go, how to be happy and how to earn money, isn’t it important to take out time and learn what your own self is telling you?

Understanding who you are is a journey that is a mix of everything — reading what others did, learning and applying from other people’s successes and failures but more than anything else, it is about having the courage to take some sort of action towards a direction your intuition is taking you and knowing your intution is all about spending time with yourself.