Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts and Reveries

I spent most of my free time outdoors as a boy. I'd like to say that's where I chose to be, and I certainly have a lot of fond memories of playing outdoors, but it's also where Mom wanted us kids to be. She might let us watch a single TV program, but then we were shooed outside so that our eyes wouldn't "turn square." Any running or rowdiness was to be taken outside. For our own good, and her own, we were turned outdoors as long as there was still light in the sky.

Usually, we didn't object, especially since outside was where the other kids were, but I also have memories of long afternoons alone in my room. I could spend hours building a fort with my blocks, then populating it with toy soldiers, good guys and bad guys. When it was finally time for the shooting to begin, I would track the path of each individual bullet from the barrel of the gun to its target which I would knock over, dead or wounded, sometimes causing them to fall dramatically from the top of a tower. In the end, the entire fort would be destroyed in slow motion, one block at a time.

Sometimes I would set up one of our family board games -- like Monopoly -- then play all the pawns as my own.

My stuffed animals had personalities, social relationships, even entire communities, complete with families, friendships and rivalries.

As I got a little older I would sort, order, and rank my baseball cards based on statistics or the poses of the pictured athletes.

And then there was always drawing, hours and hours of drawing with pencils and pens, often detailed war scenes. Echoing my block play, I would take the time to track the path of each bullet with dotted lines, making sure every Nazi got what was coming to him. (I wasn't war obsessed, but we lived near Ft. Jackson and it played a role in my imaginary life.) One of these pictures was even selected to be hung at the South Carolina State Fair.

I'm fully capable of being a social and active person, but I'm also inclined to lose myself in my thoughts and reveries. In fact, writing this blog each morning is part of that. I get up at 5 a.m. for the quiet, for the solitude, to recapture that feeling I had as a boy sorting his bottle cap collection. It's not about limiting distractions because the early morning is full of them -- the mocking bird songs, the rumble of garbage trucks, the slow, sure rising of the sun -- but maybe it is a little bit about curating them. 

I love the unmitigated rambling of my thoughts, the stewing over things, the wondering and wishing. Few things delight me more than to imagine how I would distribute a financial windfall. My wife and I call it "spending Yugoslavian dollars."

You know that I'm fully comfortable with you when I start surfacing my internal dialog in your presence. When I first started doing this with my wife she would say, "Stop obsessing!" as if my mind were plaguing me, but she now understands that I take great and (usually) private joy in letting my mind gallop to no purpose other than because it is a nice way to pass the time.

I know a lot of people who wish they could turn their minds off, who want to stop obsessing. Often they attempt to do this with distraction: watch a program, go to a museum, exercise, socialize, anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts and reveries. And, of course, smartphones have become the go-to distraction. 

A few days ago, we attended a 40th anniversary screening of the Academy Award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The director, Robert Epstein, is a friend and neighbor and the theater was full of fellow friends and neighbors. We greeted one another with hugs and handshakes, but then most settled into their seats and turned on their private screens to await the opening credits. I've stopped carrying my phone with me when I go out, so I found myself alone in a crowd. I was instantly transported to being a boy in church during a dull sermon when I would imagine the heroism I would display should we suddenly be rocked by an earthquake, or the adventure we would have if the entire building revealed itself to be a space ship sent to carry us all off to another planet, or simply the satisfaction I would experience from calculating the number of people in the pews, hymnals in the racks, or panes of stained glass in the windows.

This is a skill I learned as a boy, this comfort with, and even craving for, being alone with my thoughts and reveries. I know I'm not the only one worried about what we are losing in this era of ubiquitous screens. It really is possible to never be alone with yourself. Maybe this is a skill that can be acquired as an adult, but it's not the same thing as meditation which seeks to quiet the "chattering monkeys." I'm talking about listening to those monkeys, taking pleasure in their voices, and letting them carry me where they will, or where I will. 

Maybe it's because I learned to enjoy my quiet time as a boy that it feels to me that this is the only time to learn it, but I can say that when I look back over the arc of my life, I've spent many of my most enjoyable hours alone amongst my thoughts and reveries. Maybe I've just made friends with my obsessiveness. I don't know. But I do know that many adults, and increasingly many children, have no idea what to do with their quiet time. Ready access to screens as a boy would have likely meant that I would not have learned it at all. Maybe I wouldn't even know enough to miss it.

This is not just about smartphones, however. Most young children today are spending the bulk of their waking hours in preschools and day cares, always amidst a crowd, always stimulated and distracted, always on schedule, never alone in their room, or any room. Indeed, we've come to a point where we believe it's a danger to leave a child unsupervised in a room. When do they get to track the path of individual bullets or make an entire world from stuffies? 

Yet, at the same time, we are facing a national crisis of loneliness. I can't help but think they are connected.

Maybe one of the antidotes to loneliness is learning how to be alone with our thoughts and reveries, to know how to embrace the monkeys. We focus on the smartphones, but maybe they aren't the cause, but rather a symptom.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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