Capture the Seemingly Random Fruits of the Solitude Around You

In a perfect world, you’d get long stretches of uninterrupted solitude whenever you want them. In the real world, you often need to harness fruitful snippets of it.

I do my best writing in the shower.

Or when I’m two hours into a four-hour drive on the interstate.

Or when I’m two miles into a four-mile run on the dusty farm road near our house.

It’s a never-ending mystical prank: The best I have to offer frequently comes to me and through me anywhere and anytime the universe tricks me into not having a pen and paper handy.

But this is no accident.

It’s no practical joke either.

It’s simply the seemingly random fruits of seemingly random solitude, appearing in anything but random fashion in the life of the introvert.

Solitude in Plain Sight

We introverts tend to be a reflective bunch. Forever in our heads. Lost in thought. And thirsting for the quiet alone time that makes it possible to get lost in thought in the first place.

But the productive solitude we crave is often right in front of our faces, needing less to be actively sought out than simply spotted—and then harnessed.

When I think of solitude, I think of a monk out in the middle of an idyllic forest, completely alone, bathed in total silence. That’s my kind of solitude. Ideally.

But life is not ideal. It’s messy and overscheduled and cluttered and noisy.

So where is the solitude then, in the real world with its abundance of real constraints?

For me it’s in the shower, as the steady stream of hot water hypnotizes me through both sound and touch.

It’s on the highway as the rhythm of the tires hitting cracks in the pavement drives distractions out of my consciousness.

It’s on the dirt road as my feet pound out the miles a few yards at a time, and my head finally concedes that I’ll still be alive—probably—when it’s over and thus frees itself to focus on less morbid thoughts.

No Plan Necessary

Solitude doesn’t have to be planned, scheduled.

It’s already all around us, albeit in smallish doses, and the apparent randomness of its appearance in our daily lives only makes sense given that solitude itself—in what author Michael Harris refers to as “an involuntary process, like the pumping of a heart”—inevitably leads to daydreaming, which in turn leads to new ideas and combinations of ideas.

As Harris notes in his book Solitude:

Given enough solitude and enough time, the mind shifts into default mode and pans through connections that at first seem wholly random. It explores problems with a curiosity and openness we might never choose to entertain. But this randomness is crucial. “The power of the wandering mind,” says [University of British Columbia researcher Kalina] Christoff, “is precisely the fact that it censors nothing. It can make connections you would never otherwise make.”

All we have to do, then, is be ready.

Be ready for the small doses of solitude that quietly visit us each day.

And be ready to capture the fruits they’re bound to bear.