On Our "Virtual Route 99" With #RandomThoughts For the Week

 

People probably thought Marcus Aurelius was strange. The time he spent alone in his room. The long walks he took by himself. We know they thought it was strange that he was seen reading and writing in the Colosseum, ignoring the carnage of the games below. “The world today does not understand, in either man or woman,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes in Gift from the Sea, “the need to be alone.” Perhaps we ourselves don’t understand it. We don’t quite see the point. Or as much as we enjoy it, we don’t see it as much of a priority. As we discussed over at Daily Dad in an email recently, parents will manage to make time for so many things…but quiet time by or for themselves is written off as an impossible indulgence. “Actually,” Lindbergh writes, “these are among the most important times in one’s life—when one is alone. Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.” There would be no Meditations without this quiet solitude, but more alarming, there would have been no Marcus Aurelius, either. He had to take the time to retreat into his own soul, as he said, to rejoice in perfect stillness. He needed to step away. He needed to reflect and evaluate, prepare and anticipate. He was an extremely busy man with an endless amount of demands on his person and his schedule. But he insisted on stillness, because he knew it was the key to his health and his happiness—and his leadership depended on it. The same is true for you.