by David Kundtz
What does time below the line look like for you? These are your clues for Stopovers. It will be different for everyone and even different at various times of your life. Is it walking, swimming, loafing at your ease, watching trees, or reading poetry? The essential characteristic of time below the line is recovery of balance.
Stillpoints are the good friends of relaxation. Breathing and remembering are natural relaxants: they cause the body's autonomic nervous system to relax and recover. To increase the relaxation factor, add a few stretches, notice where you are holding tension in your body, and then breathe relaxing energy into it.
Unlike achieving things worth having,to achieve things worth being usuallyrequires long periods of solitude.
MEYER FRIEDMAN AND RAY ROSENMAN
28
The Gift of Solitude
Being comfortable with aloneness is the gift of solitude. It also includes the gift of introspection, which is the ability to look into yourself. Silence is often an attendant benefit. Pre-millennial life affords most of us very little solitude and, yet, time alone is essential to a balanced life.
“Solitude is a basic human need. We need to get away from the noise and from being with other people,” says Anthony Storr, a British psychologist who has written extensively on solitude.
A lot happens when you are alone. Recall the poet Rilke's words: “I am the rest between two notes” that are “reconciled,” but only in that “dark interval.” What happens in a dark interval is subtle and slow, with gentle nuances. When you try to imagine a dark interval between two notes in a piece of music, it seems to be a place where you must trust. You have to let go of the note that is now finished, is no longer needed, and, indeed, is now dead. But the new note is not yet there. This is also a place of solitude in which you wonder: Will the new note really come? Will it be what I expect and need right now?
The dark interval is a place of transformation. At this moment of pause, your song has come just so far; when this momentary pause is finished the song will be new, transformed, and perhaps even sent to a new octave or key. But one thing is sure: it will not be the same. After this pause it will be a new and different song.
So solitude transforms. When you come from a time of aloneness, you are a different you. The transformative nature of solitude underscores the overall significance of Stopping. The success of your life depends to a great extent upon the quality of the pauses between the events of your life. The cumulative effect of the pauses determines not only the greatness of the music, but, more important, whether this is the song you want to be singing.
It is not accidental that the great spiritual leaders of history spent a great deal of time withdrawn, apart, or alone; that is, Stopped.
One of the goals of solitude is to be comfortable with your own company, to get to know and like yourself better, and to appreciate the wonderful work of art you are. Are you not used to thinking of yourself that way? If not, please try it. Solitude will help. Often the difference between solitude and loneliness is friendship with yourself.
I don't in any way mean to say that those who are not attracted to solitude have low self-esteem. Natural introversion or extroversion are influential too. People who tend to be introverted are naturally more interested in the internal activity of the soul, while extroverts are more attracted to the soul's expressions in the outside world. One is not better than the other; they are just different. Introverts might seek solitude more easily and more often, but we all need it to some degree.
Anthony Storr also says that “the capacity to be alone . . . becomes linked with self-discovery and self-realization and with becoming aware of one's deepest needs, feelings, and impulses.” When you are alone, many things can happen that busy-ness and the presence of others disallows: feelings, understandings, remembrances, realizations, priorities, decisions, graces, and so on.
Solitude is the place for introspection: looking into your own soul and discovering there who you are, examining your life, and taking stock. It is the place that allows the internal scanning of Stopping to happen and, thus, is perhaps the most fearful of the seven traits because it allows things to come up. It is also the trait that, when embraced, can bring you previously unknown peace and calm when you discover that what is there isn't as bad as you had feared.
Sue Halpern has also written on solitude. Her lesson in Migrations to Solitude was that “the days got longer. The texture of our lives became smoother.” She gets to the nature of Stopping when she says, “I had set up this paradigm, in which you either live in solitude—you are completely alone—or you live as the rest of us do. I see that it doesn't work that way. I see now that there are degrees of solitude, and it's more about calmness.” Her “degrees of solitude” are the Stillpoints, Stopovers, and Grinding Halts of Stopping.
If being alone is daunting to you, try it in small increments and with an easy way out if you need it. Start with a Stillpoint of just a few moments alone, but with others close by, and build up to a Stopover of a couple of hours on an isolated beach or park. Each increment will increase your comfort, peace, and calm.
A temptation with solitude is to see only isolation from others rather than solitude with self. Doris Grumbach, in Fifty Days of Solitude, says “what others regard as a retreat from them or a rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.” The purpose of solitude is to improve moments of companionship. Stopping is not at all isolationist— just as the purpose of Stopping is going, so the purpose of solitude is that, when you are with people, you are more present and responsive.
I am often asked, “Can you do Stopping with someone else?” I would rather say that you can do Stopping at the same time as someone else, and probably in the same place, but the nature of Stopping in all three forms is solitary. Whether it is for one minute or one month, it is a coming back to yourself, which is by nature an individual act.
Another common question about Stopping is, “Can watching television be Stopping?” For children and young people, definitely not. For adults? Probably not, is my first answer. It's certainly not for me. For some reason, when the TV is on, I cannot not attend to it. But I have a friend who can totally space out the TV. It can be blaring and obnoxious, and he really is capable of not hearing it. For people like him, perhaps watching TV can be a low-grade, better-than-nothing, way to Stop.
Writer Sharon Herbstman, discussing the physical and psychological benefits of solitude, says, “watching television and sleeping don't count; the benefits of solitude come from being able to think freely.” I agree.
I don't know how to define noise, but I know it when I hear it and I hate it. Noise robs us of attention, relaxation, and solitude. Unfortunately, it is all around us, in the country as well as the city. So one of the dearest results of solitude is silence. For starters, “silence is one of the simplest, most valuable relaxation tools we have,” says Edwin Kelley, director of the Insight Meditation Society. On its own, it brings you down below the stress line. Can you identify oases of solitude that are also places of quiet in your part of the world? The cool quiet of an empty church? A museum? The woods near your home?
“Silence is golden,” we were told as children by adults who wanted peace and quiet. Now we know what they meant. Silence also comes in a different but no less appreciated form: the absence of words. English novelist George Eliot said, “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.” In my counseling office, I keep a small, framed reminder to myself: “It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing.”
Be by yourself. Be quiet. Just be. These are the gifts of solitude and its attendant silence.
Whatever you can do,or dream you can,begin it.Boldness has genius, power,and magic in it.Begin it now.
GOETHE
29
The Gift of Openness
Stopping also brings openness, an abil
ity to receive the gifts the world has to offer and to learn the lessons of life because you noticed them. What I most want to communicate by the word open is contained in the following words, addressed to a young poet, from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner.”
To be a beginner is the ultimate of all spiritual endeavors. The beginner knows she has something to learn; the expert “knows” the answers and he is thus cut off from possibilities.
Being open includes being teachable. This can be a challenge for many of us. Teachable is a characteristic that might appear to be a weakness because it can mean “able to be led,” but it also means you are capable of recognizing what is appropriate and valuable and pursuing it. It does not mean “being able to be led around by a leash.”
Being receptive is also a part of being open. It is the ability to take something or someone into your heart and mind. This is perhaps even more of a challenge. It sounds negative. Our culture tells us—especially men—not to be receptive but to be proactive and aggressive. Receptive is also equated with weakness.
In this way, our attitude toward receptiveness buys into sexism and our fear of the feminine. The feminine is, at least traditionally and stereotypically, receptive. The ideal, of course, is a balance and a complementarity. But there's little doubt that the aggressive wins out for many of us, men or women. It's what is generally rewarded in our culture. The more open and receptive professions—social work, counseling, teaching, or nursing, for example—are at the lower economic end of the scale, which indicates the value society places on such traits.
Why is receptivity necessary? Think of it as the most important way of gaining information, insight, knowledge, or anything. Successful life demands teachability and receptivity from all of us. The most obvious example, perhaps, is the role of student. To be a good student, one must be receptive—or teachable— at least part of the time. To get anything, you must be receptive to it. If we are not comfortable with being receptive, we'll miss much of the point of what comes our way; we just don't see it, even though it may have appeared before our eyes.
Try to conceive it this way: If all you are is action, you never get the feedback you desperately need to understand the result of your action. It is the heart of learning to know what happened as a result of what you did. Then, when you return to your active mode, you will be acting in a way that is based on the information you got by being receptive. You have created a feedback loop of information and power.
In the technique of biofeedback, you are hooked up to sensors that read your body and the level of your stress. As you experiment with ways of inducing relaxation, the machine indicates the decrease or increase in your stress level. Thus you learn to do what works and to avoid what doesn't. The trait of openness is a way of creating your own biofeedback machine. You're open, you notice, and you learn.
Open is a good way to describe the person who is capable of receiving what is available: spontaneous expressions of life, surprises, and new things.
My favorite feast of the liturgical calendar is the feast of the Epiphany. It's celebrated in early January and notes the moment that the Christ child was presented to the Wise Men from the East and, in the fuller sense, shown or manifested to the world. Epiphania is the Greek word for appearance or manifestation. I like this feast because it leads to a broader meaning: Epiphanies are all those big or little moments when we realize something, get something for the first time, have a “vision,” see something manifested like never before, or achieve a new understanding of how life is and how we fit into it. For those who are open, we can celebrate many epiphanies during the year.
Openness includes the characteristic of being non-self-judgmental. As self-awareness increases with Stopping, it is essential not to jump in and judge what we see in a negative way. Many of us have a harsh inner critic that will immediately say about any of our self-insights, “Oh, that's bad!” The more complete the openness, the more absent, or less severe the judgment.
Effective listening is also the result of developing healthy openness. Instead of thinking of what you are going to say in response as someone speaks to you, you listen—you become receptive—to the other person. You take in consciously what they say, which means you notice their tone of voice, their body language, their vocabulary, and, thus, the real meaning of what they are saying. In this way, your response is much more likely to be appropriate, accurate, and effective.
But before listening to others, you must listen to yourself. Frederick Buechner, a well-known writer and minister, says it so clearly in Now and Then: “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.” Stopping is listening to your life so that you become open enough to hear everything there is to hear. Without Stopping, we become so full of the day-to-day that we can't take in the information we need—our glass is full to overflowing and can take in no more. Stopping in all its forms allows the glass (you) to empty and therefore be able to receive even more.
Are you open to becoming more teachable and receptive? Society often neither encourages nor rewards these traits, even though it demands them for advancement. Openness will feel strange and scary if you are not used to it. As an experiment, sit in a chair in a quiet room where you will not be disturbed. Keep your eyes open and relax as much as possible for a period of five minutes while making an attempt to do absolutely nothing, mentally or physically, except to notice your breathing and what happens to you. Be as open and receptive as possible and notice whatever comes to you—thoughts, feelings, or sensations. That's all.
If that sounds daunting, it might be easier for you to just hang out. Plan a few hours with nothing, absolutely nothing, specific on your agenda and just see what happens. Develop your ability to take stock of yourself (What am I feeling now?) and your surroundings (What is going on here?). You will be surprised what, after a time, you will notice. The crucial point is to stay with it precisely when you feel like ending it.
Openness emphasizes listening (not talking), receiving (not giving), being cared for (not taking care of ), quiet (not noise), observing (not acting), noticing (not commenting), and learning (not teaching). Notice that the characteristics in parentheses are not negative or in any way bad, they're just not what is needed for Stopping.
Healthy boundaries are flexible enoughthat we can choose what to let inand what to keep out.
ANNE KATHERINE
30
The Gift of Boundaries
Emotional boundaries are a complex psychological subject. The ability to know where you end and the other person begins, to be clear about what is emotionally yours and what is not, and to have people in your life in the places and in the ways that you want them, these are all beneficial for Stopping. Having strong but flexible emotional boundaries is being able to successfully live in community. This gift encourages your involvement with the world, but helps you to avoid unhealthy enmeshment with it.
An easy way to understand this is by thinking of yourself as a house. When the house across the street burns down, you feel bad, but you have not burned down, and you go on about your life. When someone gives the house next to you a new coat of paint you are perhaps happy for that house but you don't brag about it, because it is not your coat of paint.
And as for people (continuing to use a house as a metaphor), there are some you may want outside your gate, some you want in your living room, a few you want in your kitchen, those that you want in the attic, one that you want in your bedroom, and so on. Having good boundaries is having everyone where you want them and not necessarily where they want to be. Now what does this have to do with Stopping?
It's really only with some degree of Stopping, particularly Stopovers and Grinding Halts, that you can find out w
here everyone is in your house. Stopping is like saying, “OK, everybody out of here for a while and I'll tell you when—and if—you can come back and where I want you!” Maybe you'll find out there is no one at all in your house or even inside your garden gate, and you would like to have some people there. Only when we notice where our boundaries are (or aren't) can we make choices about them.
Longer forms of Stopping, as well as Stillpoints, also help to distinguish another boundary issue: Which are truly your feelings and which are not. Another way of saying this is that Stopping helps you know the difference between yourself and everyone else.
I once observed a family in a park having a picnic lunch: mother, father, and two small children. The parents began to argue. As the parents' argument escalated to the point of yelling at each other, I observed the children's emotional states change to mimic their parents'. The children began pouting, clutching at their parents, whimpering, crying, and eventually screaming. As the parents resolved their difference, the children, too, went back to a state of peaceful picnicking. The children could not distinguish their own feelings from their parents'. That's appropriate for children, but unhealthy for adults. Your pain and joy are not mine, nor is mine yours. We can care about each other— have compassion—without losing our boundaries.
The ability to build community is an important result of healthy boundaries. In Intimacy and Solitude, Stephanie Dowrick, speaking of intimacy, says, “Without some acceptance of that ‘essential aloneness’ which is part of the human condition, the experience of closeness [to others] is often difficult.” Her “essential aloneness” is what I call being boundaried. There's a paradox again: by clarifying boundaries, by emphasizing what separates us from one another, we actually have the ability to become closer and, thus, the community is served.