Solitude and Loneliness

I drove home yesterday saying these two words to myself, thinking about them. They mean nothing if you say them quickly, you have to draw the words out as you speak stretching the vowels out like an endless Sunday afternoon.

At first they seemed to mean the same thing - being alone, and they do, physically but the difference is emotional. In solitude are happy to be alone, if you are not, then loneliness creeps in. Having lived on my own for 35 years I have been both. It didn’t matter where I was - I have been lonely amongst friends at a crowded dinner table, the conversation whirling around me like a hurricane with me at it’s still centre insulated from from it all. I have also found a peaceful sense of solitude in the centre of a city, just sitting watching the crowds mill around me. The same in the countryside, where I lived. On a quiet evening I would often take a bottle or two of beer and drive out to a spot at the edge of the hills at dusk. From there I could look out over the Lothian countryside and beyond to the Firth of Forth. As the darkness crept in and the lights came on I would sit, sometimes in solitude, sometimes in loneliness but always at peace with the world around me.

Those days are long gone now. The world turns ever changing and I change with it. The difference at least for me, from those days is of course an emotional one - love. Since I fell in love and we got married the loneliness has gone. I can be anywhere in the world, in a crowded airport, or on an isolated empty beach and there will always be someone else with me, there is a connection between us that is independent of physical space. It breaks occasionally when we fall out with each other and then that aching emptiness that is loneliness for me seeps back but that is rare and part of being in love, reminding me that love is something you do as well as what you feel.

Solitude. Loneliness. Peaceful, beautiful words that connect with what is deep within me.

The illusion of freedom and choice

Cattle trucks sadden me. Be it cattle, sheep or chickens, the sight of a truck load of them heading for the slaughterhouse touches upon a deep sorrow that lies within my soul. These creatures, the same as you and I that have hurt no-one and ask for nothing more than to live as they should do spend their last hours before death crammed together in an alien environment cut off from the natural world. And to what purpose? In all likelyhood to be minced up, smothered in tomato sauce and swallowed in seconds without a thought as to what came before.

It is not death that worries me. Death is part of life and will happen when the time is right. It is the inevitability of it all, the fact that it has been decided by someone else and once the process has begun it will run to the end no matter what I think, do or say. You can take your chance and try to escape, you may even get as far as to be able to get a glimpse of the green fields out there beyond the barbed wire, but there is no hope. Whether you struggle or go with quiet resignation it makes no difference - you will be taken back. In the scheme of things your life has already gone and that glimpse of the world outside is just an illusion born out of your desperation to be free.

Today I have briefly escaped. I can feel the anger and annoyance of those around me whose plans I have disrupted, and yes with quiet resignation I will go back, I will face up to things. But just now, just for a few more hours I would like to stay here in this illusion of freedom and pretend that I have a choice . . .