I have a treat for you today. Here is a really really really good essay on solitude and leadership by William Deresiewicz. It's an intuitive idea, eloquently and powerfully delivered, delightful to read. Give yourself time to read it slowly - it's something to philosophise about on a Sunday afternoon, and not, as I discovered some short way into it, something to skim through while you're doing a hundred other things.
And here is a tiny bit of personal insight at the risk of ruining the essay for you (maybe read this later):
The idea that concentration and solitude is critical for strengthening your mind and character, and subsequently your interactions with others, is both one that makes inherent sense to me, and one that could quite easily be validated by my own experiences to date. And yet, I fall into almost all the traps quoted here every day, thinking that doing more, particularly quickly & simultaneously doing more, is what will help me achieve all my goals - reading one more article, going to one more lecture, filling in one more scholarship application, absorbing one more bit of the mass of information that I feel I am supposed to know. All of those things are important (in fact, that very attitude led me to read this essay), but not so important that I should do them at the expense of having a reasonable amount of time to reflect on it all and find my own ideas.
It's interesting how our lives can so easily diverge from our thoughts and ideals (sometime before I started this blog, I had the exact same thought about what work had become for me), even when presented with strikingly obvious clues. I am currently reading 'Long Walk to Freedom' by Nelson Mandela. If there is a book in the world that highlights the virtues of solitude - even the enforced and uncomfortable solitude found in prison - in enriching leadership, it is this one.
It’s not all regret and remorse though. I've cultivated a few good habits in this area, from Monday night yoga practice to writing as a form of reflection or even solitary travel. And I have cultivated them precisely because I could see the positive impact that this kind of thinking had on my life. I know many of the people I admire have found their own habits of concentration and solitude and reaped similar benefits. However, whilst these practices are meant to give me a minimum amount of time for myself, in reality I 'squeeze them in' so that they are in fact a maximum.
Maybe now, just before I start a new job and lose all the time that my unemployment has given me, I have an opportunity to refocus on myself and better align my day-to-day life with my personal philosophies.
