Solitude is alone, not lonely - loneliness is an entirely different beast. Yes you can feel alone and lonely, but you can also feel lonely in a room full of people. I believe that until you can see alone and lonely seperately, you give loneliness more and more power over you.
One of the most important lessons to learn in life is how to be alone, how to appreciate being alone, how to enjoy being alone. I believe that you cannot connect fully with other people until you can connect with yourself - that you need to be fully okay being alone before you can be with anyone else. .
Let me take this a step further into love.
Put simply, you cannot fully love another person until you can fully love yourself. Put in motivational-seminar-type terms, you can think of it like this. You have a love bucket in your heart. We all want this love bucket to be full. If you cannot fill it up yourself, you will be looking to other people to fill it up for you. When you can fill it up on your own, you can give and accept love freely because you are no longer looking to fill a void. .
For there to be a free-flow of unconditional love, both people in a relationship need full love buckets. If one is trying to fill a void and the other isn't, the love becomes conditional, "I can give love back to you once my bucket is full." Whether it is said or completely unspoken, you will feel it loud and clear. .
Understanding the importance of solitude may seem like such a simple notion. Sometimes the most difficult lessons in life to learn are the simple ones. My only hope is that I can give my son the tools he needs to learn this lesson on his own, as early in life as possible. I want him to fill his own love bucket so that he can feel more love in life than loneliness. .
