I reckon I was about 25-28 when I went on a songwriting retreat near Kyneton, Victoria. Back then it was a halfway spot on the way between where I lived in Bendigo, and Melbourne. It’s a beautiful little country town and perfect for the cafe crawl that is essential for a successful few days of songwriting. I had written a few lyrics but didn’t feel all that happy with them, which was almost always the first step in songwriting for me. Some prefer getting a melody first, some do it all at the same time. I did all those things but mostly I carried an unruled journal that was full of thoughts and half written songs or poems.
In retrospect I was never much of a musician, not really. I could play the guitar and mostly sing in tune but for some reason I was most drawn to writing lyrics. I loved it and never felt more excited than when I was onto a few thoughts that seemed to be coming together as a whole.
On this particular morning, I had written pages of thoughts but none of them seemed to be connected and certainly none of them looked like even a single verse of a song. I got up early and pulled my creative equivalent of a Fire Alarm! I went to an old beautiful cafe, lined with old timber and antique looking decorations and ordered myself a bacon and eggs on toast breakfast. Also a hash brown, never underestimate the power of a good hash brown to fuel a creative burst.
First things first, when I walked in the cafe was pretty much empty. I chose a table that in my mother’s words “looked like me”. When ever I asked mum which plate of food was mine she would always say, “Whichever one looks like you!” As annoying as that was I’ve come to believe she may have been on to something. Whenever I walk into a cafe or bar I look around and wait for a table to look back at me. Same for buying clothes or shopping at the supermarket or looking through a menu.
Anyway my table found me, I sat down, took out my journal and began to scribble down words, just individual words not even a sentence. This when I had the idea of just writing down exactly what I was thinking and experiencing as I sat there waiting for my first coffee to arrive.
I wrote:
Sitting in a cafe, in a halfway town somewhere, the smell of eggs and bacon fill the air. A lady brings me coffee, wishes me a good day, and I’m left alone to think about my day.
My back is really aching and my neck ain’t far behind, the bed that I’ve been sleeping in leaves a lot to be desired. I finish of my coffee and I go to pay the bill, and the lady wishes me a good day.
First Verse, Loneliness to Solitude | RD
The key to that first verse is in the repeat of the phrase “The lady wishes me a good day”. It’s not obvious but that was the only interaction with another person I had that morning, that day actually. It frames the meaning of the song, friendly and expected but ultimately superficial and without the need for a reply. A one way piece of communication that floated past without any need or expectation of a reply. In other words, we are together, there are words but there is no connection beyond that, we began and ended as strangers.
25 years later I’m surprised I understood that back then. Maybe I didn’t the way I do now but I must have been reaching for something that I understand at least a little better today.
It’s possible to be together, for there to be words and actions, to have what most people would call a relationship yet essentially remain strangers.
RD
That sounds worse than it probably is but that particular morning I was alone and at the same time reflecting on whether I felt lonely or not. I don’t think they are the same thing. I think it’s possible to be physically alone but still feel connected as a person. In his book “Reaching Out” Henri Nouwen writes about Three Spiritual Movements one of which is the movement from Loneliness to Solitude. It’s one of the most read and reread books I have in my library. In the book Nouwen writes:
“Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.”
Henri Nouwen | Reaching Out
That phrase from Nouwen led directly to what became the refrain of this song I had begun to write in that cafe.
We need other people, to help us learn to grow and to walk beside us in a world of sorrows, but I also need the time when I can stand a see, that solitude ain’t loneliness to me
Refrain, ‘Loneliness to Solitude’ | RD
The more I sifted through my memories of friendships, family and colleagues (Social media wasn’t a thing at that point) the more certain I became aware that very few people genuinely and deeply know each other. This became so clear during the time I delivered High School Seminars in schools all over Australia. My estimate is I would have spoken to about 350,000 high school and primary school students and teachers during that time. It was quiet an experience including absolute failure to communicate and sometimes life changing success in going deep.
These seminars were all under the system we had back then of Religious Education or RE. There were different names in different states but all Australian states made it a rule to give local churches, through their Ministers Fraternal access to students for at least 1 hour per year, Usually much more. I mostly worked in small teams or 2 – 4 people which I preferred. Some were on my own and a whole stack of them were with my good friend and mime artist Steve Bell. I’d play songs and do the talking bit and he would mime to the songs. He was hilarious and students loved it. We called our little act ‘Silent Music’. We of course talked about God but by and large, the content of the seminars were mostly about understanding our humanity, The Self and Relationships as I’ve written about throughout this blog.
I will never forget an exercise we did with students towards the end of each seminar where we invited everyone to reflect on who really knows you, ‘from the inside’. High school students are a lot more capable of personal and honest reflection that they are given credit for. “Hands up who has 5 or more people who ‘really know you from the inside’ we asked. Teachers hands went up but out of the 100 or so students just a handful had their hands up.
“hands up who has less that 5′, a few more gingerly raised their hands. “How about 3′, ‘how about 1’. The last one left me feeling proud of their honesty but terribly sad at the reality.
Hands up if there is nobody who really knows and understands what your life is like from the inside. Every hand was fully extended
RD
Even those who had previously identified that they had many people in their lives who knew them, had their hands up, even the staff. It was as if with each version of that question they looked deeper. In retrospect I feel uncomfortable that we led that exercise and I don’t think I’d do it now. It opens up some very raw emotions and awareness without an ingoing structure to support them. We had of course talked to senior staff and school councillors before hand but there would never be enough to support that number of people.
That experience and many others like it including my own going awareness led me to write the second verse of that song
Standing in a crowed room, full of people that I know, we stand around, we laugh and joke the way it always goes. I sit and think of who I am in the crowd and all the noise and it seems to me that I feel has a lot to do with choice
Second Verse, ‘Loneliness to Solitude’ by RD
I was wrong in that verse. I no longer think we can always choose our feelings, I now think feelings come first. Before thoughts have had a chance to gather and put names to my feelings, the feelings are there and what’s more they are effecting me
However I still think we can be capable of making choices in the face of those feelings and this is especially true once our thoughts have caught up and been able to give us a handle on what the feelings are, where they have come from and what I want to do about them.
RD
We need other people, to help us learn to grow and to walk beside us in a world of sorrows, but I also need the time when I can stand a see, that solitude ain’t loneliness to me
Refrain, ‘Loneliness to Solitude’ | RD
The final verse of that song came as I realised it isn’t only amongst friends we can feel isolated, we can I believe feel and actually be isolated generally, we can be in a crowded room or busy street surrounded by hundreds of people and even then feel and be alone and worse we can be deeply lonely.
Walking down a busy street with people rushing past, it’s like they’re in some kind of race hoping that they won’t be last. It’s times like that when I can see how loneliness can come, to feel as if you’re just a face, not known by anyone.
Third Verse, ‘Loneliness to Solitude’ RD
So there it is, being with people is not the same as being known by people. I’ve often been amused at weddings when the two people, standing at the alter read out their personally written vows. A number of times I’ve heard things like, ‘You are my best friend, the one who truly knows me’. My partner and I were young when we married, I was 20 and she was 22. We wrote our own vows but for some reason never really mentioned knowing each other, in fact we didn’t even want to make them ‘promises’ because we had already learned by then that it would be an untruth to make an absolute claim we would be faithful to those promises for the rest of our lives. Even at the age we’d seen enough to know it simply isn’t possible. Our Minster stepped in and made us include promises and in retrospect I’m glad we did. I came to see that a promise is a statement of genuine intent, it is what I want to be, how I want to live and who I want to be. That said, and I mean this in kindly, those two people, standing at the alter cannot possibly know who the person standing opposite is.
How can I possibly know who the person I am marrying is when they don’t know who they are or who they will become
RD
This is simply an undeniable if uncomfortable fact but I don’t think its bad news or a case against marriage, not at all. Quite the opposite, one thing I love about marriage and incidentally why I vigorously support marriage equality is because I believe we need more if it. More that any other structure or experience marriage has the possibility, even a small possibility of providing two people enough incentive to explore the deeper things, the things that have not been disclosed to anyone yet. The things I am terrified of people finding out, the skeletons in the closet but also those things that are not yet skeletons, the things that are still hidden but very much alive.
The low hanging fruit of examples of this is of course pornography. Seriously is there any other thing that is so widely consumed and simultaneously so widely denied. It is everywhere, and even if it’s true that many people think it’s unhealthy it is also true that those same people find themselves clearing the internet browser history to hide the evidence. Leaving aside the very important discussion on the rights and wrongs of porn (and I do believe there are rights and wrongs) just take a moment to consider the implications of this hidden behaviour and why so much effort goes in to keeping it hidden.
There are entire courses provided mostly by Christian churches and organisations to help men kick their ‘porn addiction’ and one only needs to say the word ‘Porn’ to cause most people to feel either ashamed or angry or both. For now I’m not interested in the arguments for and against, and I believe there are plenty of both, what I’m getting at, what I’m reaching for is the impact on humanity of emotional isolation. Isolation is not only common, it increases every day and threatens our society as much as drug addiction, mental health and climate change.
In the end I have come to believe that I am responsibly for my own and other peoples isolation. It is absolutely my fault we are careering towards driving off the cliff of loneliness and I’m not entirely sure I have the courage or the strength of will to stop it.
In the simplest of terms I believe this to be true.
I am responsible for my own emotional isolation because I am either unwilling or unable to disclose the deeper things I am most afraid of other people knowing. I am responsible for your emotional isolation because I am not a safe place for you to be able to disclose those things you are most afraid of.
RD
I have no interest at all in arguing with anyone about this. These are not sudden beliefs, they are not because of some social media trend I’m into, they aren’t a religious ideology that I have been brain washed into and they are not the latest pop psychology book I read over the weekend.
My belief that I’m responsible has been a very long time coming, I feel or neither guilt or anger or shame or piousness and for now at last I don’t feel I need others to affirm or join me in these beliefs. I have come to see it this way because of a life long struggle with emotional isolation, depression and anxiety, faith, marriage, success and failure, grief, guilt, shame, joy, reading, writing, conversation, despair, love, fatherhood, pain and suffering, healing, bruising, forgiveness, judgment, prayer, mediation and more than my share of bad habits and behaviour.
It may turn out the I am not right about this, that isolation is the fault of some chemical product by a yet to be discovered gland or that it turns out to be caused by a peanut allergy or intolerance to glutton! If any of that turns out to be true I will happily amend my current belief.
What I’m trying to say is that I may not be completely right but I am certain I am not completely wrong either. Somewhere in there is a deeper truth that is emerging from my hidden and perhaps unconscious Self into my conscious and Real Self.
What I’m probably tying to say is that 25 year old may have been onto something when he wrote those lyrics, not that he understood the implications or even the extent but all these years later I can still identify with the words of those verses and especially that refrain.
We need other people, to help us learn to grow and to walk beside us in a world of sorrows, but I also need the time when I can stand a see, that solitude ain’t loneliness to me
Refrain, ‘Loneliness to Solitude’ by RD
What remains to be seen is whether or not human beings have the capacity to love themselves and each other enough to be willing and able to welcome all that is inside ourselves and inside others. Until we are, I’m afraid that most, if not all of us will remain in the same isolated place those high school students were, unable to think of a single person who truly knows what life is like from the inside.