Isolation: Lonely or Just Alone?

Amid these long days of playing the reluctant shut-in, I’ve been thinking a lot about a concept that’s mostly ignored in our cyber-connected world of Internet chat rooms and Face Time calls.

Isolation.

Not just living with yourself but within yourself.

Some of us have had more practice at this than others.

Buddhists. Gurus. Solitary confinement inmates. Mountain climbers. Polar explorers. Ocean castaways.

These people have something to tell the rest of us.

They can show us how to connect with our wondrously-bright but buried thoughts. Or instruct us on how to cope with the vast, potentially-dark chasm of our world within.

I read an op-ed the other day about how to cope with being at home, written by a man who’d spent nearly two years in a dank Iranian cell, much of the time in solitary.

I was disappointed. 

He mostly told readers how to deal with these forced days indoors, imprisoned from our routines and our daily contact with others.

Take walks, he advised. Call your friends. Eat well.

I can figure most of this stuff out for myself.

I wanted the author to show me what his unending days of forced-silence-as-torture were like.

I wanted a report from the other side, like someone returning from death, from either heaven, hell or purgatory, to help me prepare for my own day of reckoning.

What I didn’t want was pat advice, like those condescending, hand-holding “If You Go” boxes at the bottom of most newspaper travel stories.

I wanted him to describe how he confronted the drip, drip, drip of a cell leak he could not stop or control. What would it be like to be buried in Edgar Allen Poe’s Cask of Amontillado?

We all have our own inner emotional worlds to explore, like spelunkers descending caves, torch in hand, reading the complex personal hieroglyphics on the walls.

Some of us resist these trips, unless we’re in therapy. We put off going there, treating such exploration as a book to be read at a later date, or that last thing to accomplish on our growing to-do list.

But now seems the time to dive in.

It's as good as any.

I once read a New Yorker story about an athlete who took on such monstrous challenges as swimming the English Channel or the 90 miles between Miami and Cuba.

Walking along the beach, the interviewer asked an important question:

Did she ever think of what was down there? The sharks, giant squid or nocturnal sea creatures that could at any moment rise to the surface from the frigid depths of the sea, and her own imagination?

She ended the interview right then and there, on the beach.

She didn’t want to know.

Well, I do.

It’s the psychology of preparation, of not being afraid. And it is a wholly positive thing.

In terms of isolation, it's realizing the difference between being alone and being lonely.

I’ve had some practice at this.

As a foreign correspondent, I’ve spent years away from family, often in small apartments or cramped hotel rooms, in places where I didn’t know the language and had few, if any, friends.

Now I live alone in Las Vegas, apart from my wife. 

Each morning, I carry my cup of coffee out to my office casita, where I spend hours writing or on the phone.

I can go a week at times without actually seeing or physically interacting with another soul, unless you count a brief hello with the mailman.

I have found ways to not only cope, but to thrive.

To fend off the feeling of listening to the drip, drip, drip.

First off, I don’t drink alone, not even that one glass of red wine at dinner to take the edge off. I read as many books as I can, watch TV sparingly, and make sure to check in with my wife, several times a day.

I once pitched a newspaper story about isolation.

In today’s world, there are few places left where you can distance yourself from humanity, by choice or circumstance.

The Outback. Siberia. The Amazon Jungle. Antarctica.

My idea was to spend time on an Australian sheep ranch, where the kids go to school online and the doctors fly in my helicopter.

How do people cope with both isolation and togetherness?

How do families cope?

I never found time to do the story.

But in the past days, I have been given some inkling.

At my wife's condo complex, our downstairs neighbors are a young family from Russia or Eastern Europe. As the days and weeks pass, I have heard the raised voices, the muffled arguments, the father’s commanding voice, the children crying.

Cabin fever, especially for entire families, is not a pretty thing.

I talk regularly on the phone with my artist friends, who are all trying to find their own way to stay in touch with their creative selves.

One is editing a new photography project, another is sequencing a novel he wants to write, with Post-it notes affixed to the wall of his office.

Me, I write this blog and do escapist reading about baseball players in the 1930s, or sailing the high seas on illegal fishing boats.

The point is to turn off the outside world for as long as you can, including the latest death count or which celebrity has contracted the virus.

Shut off the smartphone and TV screen.

And dream.

I’ve had some practice at this.

For years now, I have not listened to music or talk radio while in my car. I decided long ago I didn’t need to listen to Terry Gross’s silky voice or insightful interviews. I didn’t have to know how the stocks closed in Washington that day.

Incredulous friends want to know, “Well, what do you do?”

I drive and I watch and I think.

I have taken ten-hour drives in total silence.

I allow my mind to free fall. 

Problems, arguments, issues with stories, all seem to work themselves out. I plan the future.

I dream.

Just today, I talked with a friend about surviving a prison term or prolonged isolation.

Would it be better to be the trained soldier, drilled in techniques of discipline and level-headedness?

Or the artist, planning one’s next project, imagining the books you will one day read, or write?

I prefer the artist’s approach.

Good or bad, no matter where you swim, you've got to come to terms with what’s down there.