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http://crochet247.com/?x=61461994659304 I have written before about spending several months alone in a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. A friend asked me, “After you’ve spent so much time alone, how does that change your life when you’re not alone? Do you bring the fruits of your solitude with you down to the city?” I will attempt to answer this question in this piece.

octagonally Last year I came down to New York City from my cabin for Thanksgiving. This was my first experience of urban life in quite awhile.One day I had an afternoon snack in a café I used to frequent. Not far away from me at another table was an attractive person approximately my age and of the opposite sex, and it was fairly easy to be aware of what she was doing.

When I first entered, she had finished eating and was opening up her laptop. She then was on the computer for a short while, but not for very long, as if she had just checked her inbox, found nothing, and then got off the computer. She then took out her cellphone. After looking at it for a second, she fiddled with it – probably scrolling through names – and then made a call. No one answered apparently, and she hung up. She played with the phone again and called another person. This time she left a message. She then looked at the phone a third time, but put it back into her purse without calling anyone. She then looked around the café. The two tables next to her were each occupied by mothers with young children. The mothers were talking to each other, their babies in strollers by their tables. The young lady began making eye contact with one of the babies, making faces and smiling. The baby was briefly interested, but soon began looking back at his mother. The young lady looked around again. She pulled her phone out of her purse, looked at it one last time, then got up, took her tray to the counter, packed up her things, and left.

A year ago, I might have said this woman was looking for distraction. But I don’t think that’s quite precise enough. I’m sure she had games on her computer and cell phone, and there were newspapers at the café she could have read or in which she could have found a crossword or Su Doku. She was looking for something more specific than that.

Clearly it was a form of human contact: but it is quite possible that she could have reached the person she was trying to call and still have been searching afterward; we all know this feeling. The baby did not quite satisfy her either. There is some kind of human contact which is like food: it refreshes and sustains, and a hunger for it develops at intervals. But you could live for a month in a crowded city and never have contact of this sort.

I feel I have some kind of insight into this phenomenon, because a solitary life greatly increases the stakes in all human contact. When you drive forty minutes in order to make a phone call, or are in a social setting with friends only once or twice a month, failed social encounters – the ones where you leave even less satisfied and more alone than when you came – become positively unendurable. You think about them for a week afterwards, and wonder what went wrong. Eventually I began to consider – with the help of some books – what made for a successful meeting. Because there are times when being with another person relieves all of your loneliness, in a way that endures for days. And there are other times when being with another person makes you feel even more lonely and isolated than before. And I felt it was necessary for my own well-being not to allow the latter encounters to pile up.

The answer turned out to be very similar to the problems of the solitary life itself. When alone you learn that your deepest satisfaction comes from letting the present moment entirely fill your mind: when walking, feeling the ground under your feet, when sawing wood, watching the blade move back and forth in the kerf. When you do otherwise, you feel the light touch of insanity in your mind – that you are literally out of your senses. Your mind is so often locked up in its own patterns that it makes no room for the moment, and allows nothing in. This learned (or re-learned) discipline of total presence is the first precondition of truly meeting another person: the complete offering of yourself to the moment and the person you are encountering in that moment.

Meetings do not have to consist of deep profundities – they merely require two people to be on the same level of awareness at the same moment. Often this occurs when the moment is so extraordinary, and its meaning so manifest, that the two people cannot help but meet. One time I was playing frisbee with some friends on the Great Lawn in Central Park, when a young man asked to join us. He caught and tossed for an hour or so, then went his way. I knew nothing more of him beside his face and his first name. Three months later, I was walking through an obscure neighborhood in the western part of San Francisco, when I rounded a corner and bumped right into him. We stared dumbly at each other for a second, knowing that we knew each other but not certain how, when we recognized who we were. He had moved to San Francisco in the intervening months, and I had quit my job and biked across the United States looking for God knows what. I never saw him again. But I remember him and I am sure he remembers me as well, because of that one moment of meeting, when we both were together in wonder at the strange vagaries of fate.

City life becomes satisfying when it provides enough of these extraordinary moments of meeting with strangers. And if you are truly present to the moment, it happens often enough and sometimes produces memories whose indelibility is entirely out of proportion to the seeming significance of the event. At other times it merely refreshes and enlivens – I have sometimes shared a knowing smile with a father at the comic behavior of his children and then breezed for twenty blocks entirely satisfied with the universe.

But in most situations more is required than simply being present to the moment. While the readiness to meet is crucial, you must have in the other person the readiness to be met. The one often produces the other, but not always. Sometimes a person may be haunted by some great sorrow which they absolutely will not show you – you can feel it, but cannot unlock it. And once in conversation, words provide a thousand masks to hide behind, all of which can prevent successful meeting. As a person with an overactive brain, one of the most common types of unsuccessful conversation I have had is detailed discussion of myriad facts and ideas and opinions, the kind of conversation Ivan Ilych’s family had around him as he lay there dying, about Sarah Bernhardt’s acting or the newest interpretation of an opera, “the sort of conversation,” as the great Tolstoy says, “that is always repeated and is always the same,” despite the fact that it seems terribly original and significant to those who participate in it.

When talk seemed much cheaper in my life, I could talk about such things for hours, and since it is a habit and a pleasure, I still warm up with my friends by talking about such things. But now I know that if I want to leave satisfied, I know I must somehow find the thing that is preoccupying their thoughts more than any other thing, and see it with their eyes – the joys and sorrows that weigh most on them. And I know that I must share mine as well. Indeed sometimes it is only in such attentive conversation that through my friend’s cues I understand what is happening inside me, and vice versa. “He can save others, he cannot save himself” is for most of us the spiritual truth that makes social life so necessary.

The other great lesson I have learned in attentive conversation is that people operate on many different levels, and for meeting to occur you must divine, somehow, the level the other person is on. This requires tremendous wisdom. The young lady in the café may have been calling her friends because she was bored; in which case you can meet her by telling her a few anecdotes; or she may have been calling because she felt alone and purposeless in the universe, and your silly anecdotes will only make her feel worse. And she may use precisely the same words to indicate these two states. It is your task to figure out the meaning. Marriage is, of course, the great school of this art. Once a couple visited me in the Catskills, and I wanted to take them to the swimming hole. They had not brought bathing suits, but we all agreed that something could be improvised in so informal a place. The wife agreed but still felt insecure, and during a stop in a nearby town she purchased a bathing suit. The purchase was made quickly and under some duress, and the suit was not a perfect match for her nor very fashionable. When she emerged wearing it, she asked her husband the ever-dreaded question, “What do you think, honey?” This is where the distinction of levels and meaning is so important. This was not a question about the aesthetic value of the match of this suit and her body. She was saying, “Honey, I feel self-conscious about wearing this, and I want you to encourage me.” This is why literal honesty, which seems like such a virtue, is not: it is necessary to meet a person with the answer to the question they are really asking, not merely to the words they use. Now of course it is the responsibility of us all to learn to speak precisely, and make clear to others, using the most accurate words we can, what we are really feeling: but this is not always possible for us.

No matter how attentive you are to this meeting, it still occurs rarely, and seems to, like the Spirit, “blow where it listeth.” But you realize that it is the thing you desire above all other things, to break through to the reality of other people’s lives, and let them into yours. Solitude, besides training the mind in presence, also whets the desire for such meeting: you are willing to endure all the difficulties, because you feel how amazing and beautiful people are. As marvellous as the bears and deer are, they cannot compare to the complexity and wonder of a human being. When you are alone you think about how wonderful it would be to have a companion who really could meet you again and again, with whom you could share your daily experiences. And so you become particularly attuned to this hunger in other people: when you see it, you know that there is a possibility of engaging, even if the person is a complete stranger. When it is absent – when a person is running off somewhere, or otherwise preoccupied – you learn to interact quickly and let them run off, even if they are close friends. Not long ago I went to one of the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcasts but could not sit next to my friends, and was seated next to a woman who came alone. After the opera, I spoke briefly with her, but I was thinking of my friends and not ready to be met by a stranger; as my friends showed up and I began speaking with them, I was not at all surprised to see her take out her cellphone. She was hungry for meeting, and having failed to find it with me, she began looking elsewhere.

One other thing which solitude – which can fairly be described as long periods between meeting – offers is the possibility of real growth and development between meetings. You may have nothing to say to someone with whom you connected well just the day before: nothing new has developed in the meanwhile. Separation is a precondition of union of this sort – a separateness in which you find something of inner value.

Almost all of us seek this meeting with others, but despite its value in our eyes few have made a habit of consciously seeking it. Paradoxically I felt it was time alone which gave me both the technique and desire to connect more deeply with people.

People are everywhere flitting about trying to find this kind of meeting and union, and it is something nature prompts us toward. But many – and I surely among them – long seek it without knowing quite what they desire, or what might satisfy it. And some stay contentedly in the shallower waters, not knowing what depths are at hand for their exploration.

For more thorough explorations of these concepts, I recommend the books Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, where “meeting” is elevated to a kind of philosophy of life, and the writings of Helen Luke, especially Kaleidoscope.