Your Solitude Is a Lot Like Your Garden—You Need to Tend to It

It’s on you to take care of your solitude—the same way it’s on you to take care of your garden.

When you have a garden, you need to tend to it. If you don’t, you won’t have a garden for very long.

The same is true for your solitude, fellow introvert. Your indispensable quiet time alone.

You need to tend to it.

Keyword you.

As author Michael Harris so wisely puts it in his 2017 book Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World:

“[W]hile forests and oceans may be preserved by the efforts of agencies and governments, the experience of solitude is by definition a personal one, so the struggle to preserve it must largely come from an individual.”

You.

How do you pull this off, this preservation of your solitude in an everyday existence that is anything but quiet?

Here are the three key secrets.

Schedule Your Solitude—Make It Routine

You may not exactly plan your care-taking sessions in the garden, but at a minimum you know how often you need to be out there watering, pulling weeds, and hoeing. You make gardening part of your general routine.

You need to do the same thing when it comes to your solitude.

Schedule it—literally if you can, and if that approach fits your personality and the way you run the rest of your daily life.

Solitude needs to be part of your routine. And the only way it’s going to happen is if you intentionally and purposefully make it the priority it needs to be for you.

Tell People What You’re Doing, and Why

If you’re an introvert and you’re in any kind of relationship—whether it’s as a significant other or as a parent, friend, or work colleague—you’re going to run into some people who, at a minimum, just don’t understand what you’re up to when you pursue solitude.

They just don’t get what it’s all about.

And they certainly don’t get the why behind it.

So it’s on you—sorry, but it’s true—to put on your educator’s hat and clue them in.

Teach the people in your life what solitude does for you; how it helps you decompress and regain your energy as an introvert.

And reassure them that your wanting solitude has nothing to do with them, personally!

Don’t Let the Phone Ruin Your Solitude

Yes, it’s sometimes nice to listen to music or even a podcast as you’re taking a walk or going for a run in solitude. Fair enough.

But be careful with that damn phone.

Be skeptical of it, actually, at least where you and your solitude are concerned.

Why?

Because solitude punctuated by nonstop texts—and Facebook/What’sApp/YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/Snapchat/X/Reddit/LinkedIn/next-social-media-sensation notifications—isn’t solitude at all.

And it’s really bad for the garden.