Frankly, I am having rather a good lockdown. Partly this is because I live very rurally – Dumfries and Galloway, in south-west Scotland, has an exceptionally low population density (about 60 people per square mile compared to the UK average of 727). Social distancing is a great deal easier and less stressful where there are so many fewer people. In addition, almost everyone who lives up my single track road works in agriculture and is therefore an essential worker and not in lockdown. Life is pretty “normal” in a daily sense. And we have a strong sense of community cohesion and care. Within 24 hours of the lockdown our “resilience hub” had been established; because I am over 70 my shopping is done for me and delivered, my neighbours keep an eye out for me. I feel both safe and undisturbed.
Moreover, after about the dreariest, wettest three months I can remember, we have been enjoying an extraordinary and glorious spring. The absence of traffic, both on the roads and in the sky, mean not just a wonderful quiet peacefulness but also a massive improvement in air quality. This combination of sunshine, hush and low pollution has increased birdsong – the other day I actually found myself irritated by the incessant repetitious carry-on of a cuckoo – and very possibly both wild flowers and butterflies. In addition we have had a good lambing and there can be few hearts not cheered by the enchanting gambolling of new black-faced hill lambs.
However, the most important reason I am enjoying lockdown, I believe, is that I am used to being alone. I am practised in silence and solitude. I have lived on my own for nearly 30 years – 12 of them in this upland glen where I built my own single-person home on the ruins of an ancient steading. And I can say with authority that it is simply not the case that solitude is inevitably bad for your mental health.
Every time I go online I encounter yet more panic about how lockdown is going to drive us all mad. Depression apparently lurks in solitude and we need to take unbelievable care of ourselves if we hope to emerge from all this with any sanity or wellbeing intact. But solitude and loneliness are two very different things: the first example of the use of the word solitude given on my pre-pandemic online dictionary is “she savoured her hours of freedom and solitude”. That does not sound too bad.
What has happened to Wordsworth’s “bliss of solitude”? To the cheerful, sane humour of the third-century desert hermits? To individuals like Bernard Moitessier, the solo yachtsman who, rounding Cape Horn in a strong position to win the first Golden Globe race in 1968, decided it would be more fun to sail on, back round the Cape of Good Hope a second time and into the Pacific again; or Tenzin Palmo, the UK-born Buddhist nun, who spent 12 years alone in a cave in the Himalayas? Why should being alone undermine mental health, wellbeing and contentment? There is I believe a strange cultural confusion here. Although we consider Homo sapiens to be an inherently “social species” – our primary creation myth (The Book of Genesis) taught that “it was not good for man to be alone” – we nonetheless put in an extraordinary amount of time teaching children to be sociable. “Don’t bite”, “play nicely”, “games are more fun if you keep the rules”. We send them to nursery partly so they can learn to interact with their peers; we are angry with them if they are rude and we supervise them with an almost bizarre degree of anxiety. “Stranger danger” dictates their freedoms, although in fact, except for 1996 – the year of Dunblane, when the 16 murdered children were in school under the safest possible supervision – the number of children murdered or assaulted by strangers has been pretty much static since the 1950s. (And 80% of children who are murdered are killed in their own homes by a family member, usually a parent; the figures for sexual abuse are also highest in the home and most likely to be committed by someone the child knows.)
Meanwhile we give them no training or support in the apparently difficult and “unnatural” skill of being alone.
How much better it would be for the struggling parent to make it a reward for virtue – “You have been so helpful/ good/ polite/whatever all afternoon, now you can go to your room and be alone for a bit as a treat” – and never a punishment. The “epidemic of loneliness” we hear so much about in the early 21st century might well become a “joy of solitude” if it was experienced as a positive and earned pleasure from early childhood.
There is a good if odd little example of how our terror of children being alone is warping our sensitivity to their needs in Richard Louv’s wonderful 2005 book Last Child in the Woods. He argues persuasively that “nature deprivation” is seriously damaging to young people and almost boasts that he lets his children go into the woods without adults – and then adds “so long as they have their mobile phones with them”. If we took this seriously it would suggest that almost everyone over about 50 had been placed at serious risk by their parents.
My children’s father did a sweet thing when they were very little. As we went to bed he used to place an unexpected toy in the cot with them so that when they woke up they would have a treat and something to do with and by themselves. Part of the hope of course was that we might get an extra minute or two of sleep, but it was also so that they could learn that being alone could be fun and exciting.
The thing is that, quite apart from Covid-19, young people are increasingly going to need the skills of being alone happily; between 1999 and 2019 the number of adults living in single-person households rose by nearly a quarter, from 6.8 million to 8.2 million and is projected to go on rising. It would be tragic if all these individuals were doomed to poor mental health and loneliness.
What if, instead of a huge disadvantage, being alone were framed as an opportunity for developing the self? Solitude seems to be more or less a necessity for creativity, for instance, whether it is drawing, painting, writing, learning an instrument, cooking or any other kind of creative activity. It is also very useful for anyone wanting to deepen their spirituality – this is why both Christians and Buddhists encourage retreats: periods of chosen isolation and usually silence.
I believe that in order to see well, and particularly to see wild nature, you need to be comfortable within your own solitude. Almost all good field naturalists would agree that both the silence and the patience needed are enhanced when you walk or sit by yourself; there is a particular quality of attentiveness (which may in fact be similar to that needed for creativity) which the presence of someone else can too easily dissipate.
We know too that practised solitude increases self-knowledge and independence. And this makes us less vulnerable to emotional abuse and more able to remove ourselves from such situations. And this in itself may well make us a better, because less needy, friend when we do engage.
Spending time alone is in fact spending time with the person you know best of all and who knows you better than anyone else does. Solitude deepens self-knowledge. Interestingly, the words “solitude” and “loneliness” ought to have similar meanings: “solo” and “alone” do after all. But faced with courage and determination they do not.
Loneliness is a negative, sad feeling. Solitude on the other hand is bliss. And practice makes perfect. So practise.
Sara Maitland is the author of A Book of Silence (Granta, £9.99) and How To Be Alone (Macmillan £8.99)
