Osler's Razor

This year has included a lot of solitude. I am finishing up a first-year Crim Law casebook (Contemporary Criminal Law, West Publishing, 2018), and the thing is up around 1,000 pages and over 400,000 words.  It is due to the publisher this coming Friday, and it is going to be done on time (I'm just finishing up some fine-tuning at this point). That all is good-- and I really do think this is going to be a good and worthwhile book.

To get it done, I have had to spend a lot of alone in my office reading and writing. Some days, I didn't interact with anyone else during the work day. My office was a little monastery. At lunch I would walk alone, needing to keep the strand of thought in my head so I could go back in and continue a coherent line. It was like a bubble I could carry with me; I would see people but was invisible as I passed the other way. A city is a good place to be alone.

I don't know that I have had that kind of solitude before in my life. I'm an introvert anyways, but this was a new level of aloneness and focus.

Aloneness is something that Jesus sought sometimes. He retreated to the wilderness for 40 days (much more aloneness than I dealt with!) and was tempted during his solitude (I only had to resist the temptation of Facebook).  At other times, too, he withdrew. There was something important in that.

There is a sense in our society that if you are alone, there must be something wrong. I'm not sure that is healthy. Aloneness can be necessary, and a sense of comfort with aloneness can be a gift (and hard to obtain). Of course, sometimes there is something wrong when people withdraw, and we need to pay attention to that. But... aloneness is not necessarily a failing.