Alone

I spent time this morning walking the path which runs along the back of this beach, and then spent time sitting on a bench overlooking a distant view. The path is part of the coastal walk from Inverness to John o' Groats and, as it did today, it attracts visitors from both this country and abroad.

I like it when they stop to talk, as the two foreign couples walking together did today, but I prefer it if no-one comes along the path and I have the view and the swash of the waves and the occasional call of a seabird to myself. There is something very cleansing about being alone; it's like topping up one's battery before returning to a world which is exhaustingly dominated by humans.

It used to worry me that I enjoyed solitude so much. I was persuaded by articles I read in magazines like New Scientist that liking being away from other humans was, somehow, unhealthy; that we need social contact. Happily, in this week's New Scientist there's an article titled 'The Power of One' which is subtitled, 'For decades we have assumed that spending time alone is a bad thing. Yet solitude can help us flourish.' I read it and found that the research it quoted perfectly reflected my views.

Happily, because I'm retired and my time is very largely my own, I am able to find solitude and enjoy it, but when I look back at my working life I can identify times when a bit of this removal from the hurly-burly of modern life would have been very beneficial. The trouble is that, in our crowded world, one which seems to function at an increasingly rapid pace, finding such opportunities becomes more and more difficult.