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Even in a Quarantine, You Need Solitude
How my wife and I realized we needed a mental health break
Yesterday was awful.
Patience ran low, frustration ran high, and tempers were nearly lost.
Then in a moment of clarity, my wife looked at me and said “you know what the problem is? We need solitude.”
At first I was confused. This is a quarantine, we’ve had nothing but solitude and isolation for weeks. Then I realized, she was right.
Last year I read a book called Lead Yourself First by Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin. They defined solitude as a time when your mind is free from the presence of other minds and is able to work through a problem on its own.
Without solitude your mind is reactive instead of active.
Even in a quarantine my mind is constantly reacting to the thoughts of other people. My kids, my wife, the billion strangers on my phone.
When you are taking a break from concentrating, your mind should feel restful, but when you are stuck in a state of perpetual reaction you feel restless.
The ironic part is before the quarantine, I had actually had the idea that once a month one of us would watch the kids on a Sunday morning while the other took some time for…
