"Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone".
Paul Tillich
"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement"
Alice Koller
First, we need to understand the difference between the concepts - 'loneliness' and 'solitude'. According to Paul Tillich, loneliness is a word that expresses the pains of being alone, solitude however, is a word that expresses the glory, the awesomeness of being alone.
Quick caveat: This is not an attack, or thereabout on social networking, however close to, it may seem. Truth is, why would I wanna do that? Matter of fact, I'm social networking at the moment. I'm merely trying to illustrate the fact that the youths, who are obviously the most fascinated about the whole concept of networking and texting and tweeting, run the risk of losing their solitude. We do not wanna lose solitude, because losing solitude means losing the 'propensity for introspection' as it were.
We spend valuable time online, scratch that, we spend all time online, chatting with friends, updating facebook status, commenting on facebook status, liking facebook status, sharing facebook status, tweeting, vlogging, pinging, and tweeting (yes, I know, I mentioned tweeting twice). FUN!, I must confess, however what happens to our mind all that time??? The mind of the youth is a well of ideas, a well that never runs dry, kind of like God's love for us, buh in order to harness that mind to positive effects, we need to be alone, to think, to imagine, to dream Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures".
We are losing our ability to immerse our minds introspectively. The youths are the future, make no mistake. However, the future needs to be introspective, forget what Master Oogway said about the future being a mystery. The future is you and I, and you and I need our 'mind space' back.
See if you can spend less time online this week, and more time in solitude and deep thinking. Have a remarkable week.
Till next time,, keep dreaming!!
5 comments:
What about blogging, u blogging, buh u dd nt mention blogging n ur list that included tweeting. Twice.
Damn, u make 2 much sense on in here men, i'm proud o u even tho i dnt know u.
Good talk.
yea. Blogging too. Lol!
Why can't I do both? I bet you do some heavy thinking when ur bloggging....
Post a Comment