Seclusion & Aloneness

Loving the world from afar. The pitfalls of martyrdom.

Seclusion

I have lived away from the world for a long time.

My home is one of the most remote and inaccessible places places on earth. I have lived here for seven years, gradually uncivilising myself. It has been at least three years since I stepped inside a shopping mall; shoes and underwear are novelty items that I seldom have occasion to wear.

When I first moved out here, most people thought I was legitimately crazy. By then I had already tasted the pleasures of seclusion, having let go of my worldly affairs some years prior.

My motive in coming to live here was chiefly experimental: could I live apart from contemporary civilisation? Was it even possible? I am a community-oriented person, not a hermit, and so my secluded life has always been a shared one. Even so, in the years that have ensued, I have learned to live without things that most people think are necessary.

For five years, our internet connection was so slow that in the time it took to load my email inbox in HTML, I could go outside and hang the laundry up. When the satellite cut out from time to time, we would always be a little stressed for the first couple of days. But once that subsided, the experience of being uncontactable for weeks on end was exhilarating. (For the record, that old satellite dish is now the roof of our sauna.)

I make my own soap and toothpaste and vinegar. There is no fridge here. When I feel like eating chocolate, I first harvest the ripe beans, ferment them in a jar, dehydrate and lightly roast them, peel them, grind them, and mix the powdered beans with sweetener. If I ask my mum to send me some chocolate instead, then a care package can take months to arrive at the post office.

I have adapted to nature’s cycles of dearth and abundance, subsisting for years on a diet comprising mainly papaya and banana, aibika leaves and coconut milk, yams and taro. I have fasted for weeks on end. I have freebirthed. I have learned more about being a human by living away from other people than I ever could have done otherwise. It is a way of living that requires commitment.

The choice to live in seclusion means adapting to a set of needs determined by locality; people have come and gone over the years, and I have stayed on because all of my needs are met here. The wilderness has tamed me because I have remained for long enough to understand it. For everything material that I have gone without, I have been compensated incommensurately through the quality of experience.

In withdrawing from the world, I learned to love it. I no longer expect the world to accommodate me, to meet my demands; my real needs are so few that they are always satisfied. I have learned to live with discomfort, privation and loss; my life is unbuffered, and this is the price of freedom.

Out here there is nobody to blame when things go wrong — no pillars of society to admonish for neglect, no institutions to rage at for their iniquity, no concept of justice except that which I invent and impose upon myself. Out here, I have learned to remain unconditional: to love what is happening, to create what is needed, and to serve other people.

The process of uncivilising myself happened in stages. First, I learned to live without conveniences: old habits were dropped, old comforts forgotten. Thresholds of physical and emotional endurance were tested continuously, and I found myself willingly relinquishing things I never thought I could live without (cheese was one of them).

I learned to think without the accrued detritus of socially acceptable opinions. My language changed: concepts were articulated through mood and feeling, and the need to explain my viewpoint drastically diminished. Thoughts became my own, rather than postures I assumed to impress or undermine others.

Connections form fluidly without opinions to stifle them: there are no ideological nemeses lurking in the world at large, only others locked in unique manifestations of our collective human suffering. The friendships I have formed have a different quality than social bonds; everybody starts to feel more like family, even people whom I hardly know.

I have become intimate with madness. I have rubbed up against the coat of my own unique pathology so often that its expression is as familiar to me as that of an old pet. Thresholds of insanity are crossed, by necessity, so that the heart may reveal its stifled longings; it is a process that I have lived through in order to realise peace.

The presence of nature attunes one to a flow of ineffable creativity. Without distraction, I have learned to adapt to any task that is required of me; there are no unlearnable skills, just incrementally advanced states of play. I have cultivated a willingness to do what life asks, and miracles start happening, transforming the field of action into a place of purpose, alignment, and trust.

My worldly persona has become a mask that can be put on or taken off as required by circumstances. Masks are important, and I have a lot more to say about them. The social mask woven through a spell of seclusion permits one to interface with the world without getting drawn into its complexities; sometimes, it is even worth putting on the shoes and underwear to live out a particular purpose.

Aloneness

A few years ago, I was involved in philanthropy. Donors flew me throughout the Pacific islands for project meetings and workshops. I used a project-funded laptop to draft policy documents on a coral atoll in the Solomon Islands. My hotel resort in Fiji was like a gargantuan gilded seashell, gleaming white and gold.

In Manila, I sat in an aggressively air-conditioned hotel basement listening to boring presentations for five days. I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and voraciously, unapologetically hungry; the caterers had no notion of how to feed a vegan, and so I subsisted on jam toast, segments of unripe pineapple, and greens fried in rancid oil.

I had to wear shoes and underwear all the time, but the whole situation was uncomfortable for more reasons than that. The story I was living out seemed to belong to somebody else, somebody who could thrive in the world; somebody who was actually a professional. I had just wanted to be Useful, and it had led me into the world of interminable meetings, reporting deadlines and contractual obligations.

A part of me had been seduced by the promise of philanthropy — that my efforts were aligned with some greater good, that I was doing something meaningful and beneficial for humanity as I ploughed through the snowdrift of spreadsheets. The world of philanthropy is purpose-built for raging martyrs like myself, people who contort themselves to be Useful and Needed for a hit of egoic adrenalin.

After years of seclusion, now people were depending upon me. Civil society partners depended on me for funding support. Donors depended on me for grant administration and project management. Government depended on my projects for sustainable development goals. My brain’s left hemisphere puttered into action and I drafted budgets, timelines, strategic deliverables. I liaised with stakeholders and patiently answered obtuse emails.

I was lonely during all the project travel. I missed my family and community, our secluded life together. It was the first time I had been away from my daughter, who was nearly two. The situation was drastically different from when I was young and adventuresome, ready to do anything; I had become rooted in family life and it was a shock to navigate solo after years of togetherness.

My only companion in Manila was the embryonic Raphie: we found out that he was coming on the day before my flight. For our first date, my unborn baby and I ate at a fancy restaurant. They knew how to feed me there — it was the best meal of my life. At that time I did not own a smartphone; seated alone at my table in the busy dining room, I gave the food and service my unmediated attention.

The waiters loved me. I loved the waiters. They sang me a folk song in Tagalog and then served me a dish based on the lyrics. I openly wept while eating it. I had turned up alone to that restaurant, save for the secret of Raphie growing within me; in my aloneness I was cared for and nourished, and it felt like home.

In the midst of the noisy service I sustained an inner silence that affirmed my presence as part of the world. Everything was just so; delight and joy flowed out of me, attracting kindness and generosity in response. Without distractions, and without the story I had been living out in the business hotel, my dinner felt more like a holy communion than a donor-funded subsistence transaction.

But loneliness crept in again on the taxi ride back through the city — the crushing melancholy that follows a mystical high. I did not belong amongst the freeways and fluorescent signage, and I could not connect with the stories of the thirteen million people slung between the extremes of poverty and opulence in this metropolis. Above all, I felt ashamed that I was even there at all.

My presence in Manila seemed like a pointless extravagance. All of the work I had poured into my projects felt vain and worthless; hustling for grant funds had taken me away from the place I loved most, away from my life of seclusion, from my family and community. Never in my life had I felt more like a fraud.

Aloneness and loneliness are often described as two sides of a coin: in aloneness, one is filled with the presence of Self; there is a benevolent power that arises from within, elegantly weaving the world in harmonious order. In loneliness, one struggles with the void of Self: a harsh dissonance that disconnects one from the world, a dense forgetting of one’s power and purpose.

My threshold for passing from one state to the other intensified during all this project travel — no doubt due to the pregnancy hormones — but also because I was frenetically shifting between masks, not sure of the purpose for which I was wearing them.

The meaning of this dialectic was clear from the outset: I was being asked to examine my goals and motivations, the preconditions that had led me so far away from myself. At first I had treated the world of philanthropy like a game, but now I had dislocated myself in its pursuit. I felt exposed and unsupported, overwhelmed by the extent of responsibilities that I had been piling upon myself.

As I was coming to terms with the fact of having a new baby, I was simultaneously signing contracts that designated my personal oversight over grants that totalled a six-figure sum. Life had served me an interesting round of hardball: I was conscious of my masks, but not the true reason for choosing them. I was out of my depth, but too proud to relinquish any of the tasks I had set myself.

Already I was starting to feel an internal division: my ambition as a do-gooder contradicting my motherly instincts. In a year’s time, would I be nursing a baby with one arm whilst filing receipts with the other? Could he be patient for his feed while I took to the meticulous task of updating my logframes?

In life, we wear masks all the time. We put them on only to take them off. Sometimes we think that one mask is the right one, the one that accurately represents the face beneath it. But there is no face beneath it, just an open wound waiting to be sealed with the promise of something.

Which mask, of all the masks I was wearing, would outlast the others? I had a mothering mask and a managerial mask and a martyrdom mask and so many besides to cover my shame. When they all got ripped away, one by one, I was left alone with the nothingness of being; and only in this, perforce, did I find my sanctuary.

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