Physical solitude, exterior silence,  genuine reflection, and recollection are all morally necessary for anyone who wants to lead a spiritual or contemplative life.

“Like everything else in creation,” writes Thomas Merton,” they are nothing more than a means to an end, and if we don’t understand the end, we will make the wrong use of the means. We won’t go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them to have nothing more to do with them but to find out the way to do them the most good…”

As often happens, I think Merton somehow has me and my life in mind when I read his essays and contemplations, although I know better. I wish he were alive so I could thank him for the good he has done me.

I began to practice solitude, silence, and deep recollection to help me heal and connect with other people in a healthier and better way. When I started to express too much anger to people who criticized or offended me, for example, I went into silence to try to understand what was happening inside and outside of me.

I understood and saw that anger, a part of me, was not a proper response in terms of my well-being or other people’s. Anger doesn’t accomplish much other than frightening and upsetting people and generating more anger; that’s not really what I am about or wish to be about.

More than anything, anger was how I tried to protect myself. As I age, I am free and am shedding the baggage of the past.

I feel that learning to be alone permitted my true self to emerge. I am by no means perfect, but I am by any measure healthier. I am not a different person than I was; I don’t believe it is possible to become someone else. But I am a better person, and that is possible.

I can’t do anything about all the angry people in our country right now, but I don’t need to be one of them, either. If you believe in God, you must leave it to him or her. If you don’t, you have to find peace in yourself and within yourself.

Before I learned how to be alone, I didn’t understand how central solitude is to the interior life, where spirituality resides.

But I believe that only those who have never experienced solitude believe it makes no difference and can’t change us in positive and meaningful ways.

The solitude of the heart matters to me, one kind of solitude leads to another, and I ended up facing the truth about myself, seeing myself more clearly and responding more widely. The anger I carried in me all of my life is an echo now, a ghost, an imprint. I like myself a lot better; sometimes, I even love myself.

I don’t feel hatred much any longer, even as it swirls all around me,  and the anger I was attracted to and drew to me has melted away. Most of the time, it’s gone.

It is possible to change, at any age, at any time. I had first to learn to be alone.