"But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."

I've been very ill for the past few days, so I guess that's what brought it on.

There's something about being ill that cuts you down to your most essential self. You don't have the strength or stamina to put on the normal airs and pretenses that you usually make use of. You have no choice but to be genuinely, completely, exhaustedly yourself. When you have to get up to move around, you do it with the open, helpless innocence of your inner self, of your deepest inner child. Your mind is too shot to focus on the trivial, so you wander into contemplation of the bigger, more profound, more all-encompassing. Small things simply don't have enough weight to hold your focus.

I can only guess that this was the trigger because it's the only thing I can find that can account for it.

I was traveling across the city today, trying to get home in order to do some work. It's a bit chilly these days; not cold yet, but the overpowering heat is definitely retreating. I had to hop on a couple of different busses to get home because I was feeling too weak to think of walking back to my flat from the metro (although only a paltry 10-15 minute walk, I was really feeling that ill). Suddenly, as I was sitting at the bus stop in Şişli waiting for my second bus, it washed over me with the rapidity of the incoming tide: a strong, odd, but very familiar feeling that I have not felt since before I settled down into a job here and stopped backpacking or living like a student.

I had trouble identifying it at first. It felt like an old friend, and I welcomed it even before knowing what it was that I was embracing. I let it settle over me until I recognized it. It was that feeling, that strange, wild feeling of loneliness and isolation that sets you free even as it terrifies you. It is like feeling a current pull you out into the vast ocean of human experience. You have a sudden sense of the massiveness of the world and its people, of your infinite minuteness. You are overwhelmed by the reality that you can never know all the world and everything in it, that it will always be, at the end of the day, a mystery. You cannot be the master of any part of it. No level of comfort or familiarity can ever defeat this truth. On some level, all will always be foreign to you, and you will always be a foreigner.

It is easy to lose this sense of lost identity when you have a nice job, a busy schedule, a nice place to live, and enough money to do more or less what you please. You settle into a sense of normalcy, and you lose sight of the deep-down wildness of the world. As a student or a backpacker, you cannot lose it so easily; you are always living on the edge. Not having enough money helps. You are never very separate from the realities of life. I guess this is one of the reasons I've never really liked living in very nice neighborhoods: these places create a distance between you and the wilder nature of reality.

Sitting at the bus stop, sick as a dog and thinking only of lying down in my bed and ordering take-out, I felt as if a veil was being lifted from my eyes, and for the first time in nearly two years, I saw again that reality and felt again the deep truth of my own separateness and isolation. And God, was it liberating.

I truly love my own solitude. It has become sacred to me. It is this golden sliver of time in which you are truly, honestly yourself. It gives you the time and energy to delve into the eternal mystery that is one's own mind and soul. It gives you the space to connect to yourself. Isolation is not a curse but a blessing. It is a gift. Without it, where is self-discovery? Without it, where is clarity of the self? Without it, how can we reach to others with real and true Love? Knowing yourself and loving yourself honestly and genuinely allows you to love others.

Isolation does not prevent relationships; it strengthens them. It gives more depth and meaning to every encounter. It gives you the insight, love, and compassion to engage fully with the people around you. Seeing yourself is seeing others, for who around you is not, like you, a person searching for joy and fulfillment?

We are alone. All of us together are alone. Why does that need to be a bad thing? Can it not be joyful? Can we not rejoice in our opportunity to know ourselves, to open our hearts wide enough to embrace all of this mysterious, unknowable world with unconditional fervor? Can we not glory in the wondrousness of a world that is too big for our minds and egos but big enough for our hearts? We can work a lifetime to know and understand the world and ourselves, but we never fully can. Is that not exciting? Is that not a thrilling idea, to know that you will never run out of people to meet or things to experience or wonders to witness?

Because you are always alone, you are always surrounded. You are always swept by the current of the vast ocean, alone and apart yet deeply within it. Is that not intoxicating? Is that not exhilarating?

Does that not set you free?