To Keep Company With Oneself

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September 9, 2018

a project of ServiceSpace

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

- Thomas Merton -

To Keep Company With Oneself

Philosophy student Jennifer Stitt writes a thoughtful essay asking whether we would become lonely in solitude or find new depths? Philosophers have long distinguished between solitude and loneliness. Emerson celebrated the former, in which "nature may speak to the imagination, as she never does in company." Socrates celebrated the soundless dialogue "which the soul holds with herself." And in the 20th century, Hannah Arendt muses, "Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business," reminding us that the self "is the only one from whom you can never get away - except by ceasing to think." { read more }

Be The Change

Take up with a friend the question of solitude. If there is a difference between loneliness and aloneness, can you put words to what it is? What must be shifted in my attitude so that loneliness can become solitude.

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