Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking
In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;
…
There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:
It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning.– Canticle 6, May Sarton
Among the first questions people ask when learning I’m a solo nomadic is “Don’t you get lonely?” or “How do you cope with loneliness?”
Truth is, I only think about these concepts when someone asks about them, so for me it’s a “no” to both questions. To understand my response, you need to know I’m a natural introvert who’s learned to be an extrovert on demand. When interactions overload the senses, then I need space and quiet to reflect and think, to be alone.
For someone like me, solo traveling in my RV is an ideal lifestyle, one where I can occasionally enjoy face-to-face socializing yet on the whole, have plenty of alone time to reflect, to write, to think. When living in a city, this seemed only possible when retreating inside of a house’s four walls. In my rolling RV home, I can move on down the road or find a secluded camp site in nature and spend hours or days in solitude.
Probably the least understood need by introverts is for time alone. Often judged as unsociable or unfriendly, it’s really how we recharge our batteries so we can endure (and mostly enjoy) encounters and interactions with others. One good example happens during Travato meet ups (a three+ day get together of Travatos anywhere from six vans to a hundred or more), the Travato tribe accepts it if one occasionally retreats to the van for several hours versus hanging out constantly around the fire, on the porch, or wherever the active social circle. This behavior, at least in my experience, is not as accepted in the business world, thus the need for introverts to develop the ability to toggle extrovert mode on demand, akin to role playing or method acting I suppose.
The reality of today’s connected world means none of us are truly alone. Most introverts I know, including myself, engage in online conversations and those seem to exist in our introverted worlds somewhere between in-person socializing and being alone: not as potentially draining as being with people, yet not as isolated as solitude when there’s no internet connection.
But here’s the part some people struggle to see as positive about introverts traveling solo: you are the only decider on where to go, stay, see, or do. As the old saying goes, you are both chief and head bottle washer: decisions and how to spend time are all yours (for good or bad!). Traveling with a companion is more about ongoing compromises and there’s nothing wrong with that if one needs that constant companionship.
So when others ask these questions, I smile and say “Not really,” when I’m actually thinking “How could I be, when I go and do where and what I want and have all this nature around me to commune in introspection and quiet solitude.” As Sarton said, being alone is never lonely for those that embrace a free spirit.
It’s always good to meet up with old friends (“old” meaning an indicator of time known). And it’s always interesting to spend time with people face-to-face that you spend time with exclusively from a distance. Like old pen pals of letter writing days long past, the new world of bloggers offers the opportunity to gain intellectually based friendships and then ultimately meet in person, only to find it out of sync to know someone so well but struggling to recognize them on the street! Contrast that to people you know in person but don’t really know what makes them tick: you could pick them out in a crowd but could you predict how they think, what makes them jazzed about life, or whether you could trust them with your secrets?
The magic continued in the Rainforest Pyramid, as I was able to find the two elusive sloths that inhabit the pyramid, apparently the golden chalice of the experience. A guide we chatted with had been looking for the sloths all morning, and after us telling her we’d seen them and where, she scooted off in an excited hurry to find these elusive, yet incredible stationary, hairy creatures. (They were entwined with each other high up in one of the many lush trees near the entrance to the pyramid, looking more like someone emptied the lint from a large vacuum cleaner rather than the elusive prized residents of this amazing pyramid…and no, I couldn’t get a digipix that would prove we saw them.)
On this particular day we lucked out and managed to go through the pyramid between groups of noisy schoolchildren thus enjoying the place to ourselves. I don’t know if it was my friend’s nature karma again or the absence of humans while we walked around, but the birds were as tame as house pets, evidenced by this pix of her trying to digicapture a scarlet ibis as one was stealthily checking her out! In some cases we had to stop walking or we might have stepped on some of the denizens of this man-made representation of Mother Nature’s rainforest, complete with waterfalls and faux sounds of frogs and nightlife. Ultimately though, we left, and the residents continued doing what they do well in their envied halcyon lives within the glass walls of Eden in Galveston.
A long-time friend is coming into town tomorrow and I’m going to take some well-deserved (at least in my opinion!) time off from work and go on a little road trip to see the sights. While I’ll be in wireless touch during some of that time, I may not blog until next week. But I’ll have lots of pix from the long weekend to share and blather about, assuming the weather behaves and we see a bit of sunshine. A cold front is supposed to roll in on Thursday with a little rain and lots of clouds. The drop in temperature will be highly welcomed but it won’t make for digicam nirvana.
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