Being with people is one of those things that I mostly love. Children and old people are some of my favourites. There’s something about the candidness of both that refreshes and invokes a freedom that, in my mind at least, lets me be more me.
As much as I love people, I have a lot of trouble in crowds. Whether it’s a movie theatre, the celebration of the start of a marriage or a Sunday service, sometimes I feel the power of the collective threatening to assimilate me and I begin to hear voices chanting, “Resistance is futile.” But because I value the experience on some level I compensate by focusing on a handful of individuals in an attempt to make meaningful connections. Otherwise, I am awash in noise and confusion. Have you found yourself in a room full of people and felt conversationally pulled every which way? It’s the kind of thing that incapacitates me. I freeze.
It’s ironic that spending time alone makes me better in community. There are times when I need to be by myself in order to accomplish something or to be quiet with my thoughts or simply to rest. When I do spend time by myself I feel energized. That prompts me to seek companionship. I am more attentive, more able to enter into another’s world, more patient with foibles and more in wonder at the beauty of God’s creation in this incredibly amazing person who chooses to spend her time with me!
Someone once said to me, “don’t isolate!” At the time I wondered if she was projecting her own tendencies onto what may have 
seemed to her to be my tendencies. Someone else quoted, “Whom the devil wishes to destroy, he first isolates.” I can see the merit in these bits of advice and like most advice, context is everything. But solitude is not the same as isolation. As I see it, isolation is an avoidance of people and negatively propelled. Solitude is loving people from a temporarily quiet place so as to create an atmosphere where better interaction between people can take place. The Greeks call that exchange, “koinonia”, the Hebrews say, “Shalom” and the Hawaiian’s refer to it as “Aloha”. All three expressions move past the veneer of surface socialization toward deep communion, camaraderie and sometimes, even the miraculous.
“…he (Jesus) slipped away by boat to an out-of-the-way place by himself.”
“On return, they beached the boat…when people got word he was back, they sent out word through the neighbourhood and rounded up all the sick, who asked for permission to touch the edge of his coat. And whoever touched him was healed.”
