One is the loneliest number
One is the loneliest number
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do                                                           Harry Nilsson, One, 1968

I remember lying awake during my middle and high school years, surrounded by my sleeping family yet utterly alone. In the middle of the night, I let my teenage angst suck me into a dark and solitary insomnia. Certainly no one but me has ever worried so well. Certainly no one but me has ever said, done, or thought such regrettable things. Oh, one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do!

Those who enter the sanctuary of solitary understand, far too well, what it means to face the music. Stripped of pretenses and without backup, they enter the back alleys and abandoned buildings of those sketchier, less traveled regions of the soul. Foolish at times, courageous at others, they stand alone. For better or for worse.

There is something tragically solitary about an individual eating alone in a restaurant. While others are thick in conversation and fellowship, he or she eats in silence. I realize that one is always connected in this era of smart phones. Still, however compelling digital connections may be, they pale in comparison to personal connections. An emoji smile packs one millionth of the brilliance that a real one does.

Although solitary may wear the drab cloak of angst and loneliness, it may also burst onto the scene–unexpectedly, magnificently, all sequins and shine. Look at me, it announces. Just look at me. 

Walking along the old highway today, my eyes swept the roadside, now mostly green and bronze as summer gives way to autumn. Until I spotted a small patch of wild chicory. The recent rain offered one last periwinkle blooming. In the middle of this blue, however, was a solitary white blossom. A white chicory in all its solitary glory! Look at me, just look at me. 

There is an intimacy in the sanctuary of solitary that pulls you decisively in, inquiring: Has anyone else seen this? Are you the first, the last, the only to witness this? And as the unlikely, yet fortunate, witness to this solitary enigma, you revel in its oneness.

Because solitary is often by design. Seeing the white chicory blossom, I could not help but recall Robert Frost’s poem, “Design”:

 I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?–

If design govern in a thing so small.

What had that flower to do with being white? The Designer does, indeed, govern in things so small. And this governance may provoke both darkness and delight. Yet even if something is terribly, darkly solitary, a dimpled spider, fat and white, it is something to behold.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. He continues to expound upon solitude in his journal (February 8, 1857):

You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.

The sanctuary of solitary may be exactly as Thoreau describes: a silken web or chrysalis from which those who give themselves to solitude may ultimately burst forth a more perfect creature[s]. Like Thoreau, I have rarely felt impoverished in solitude. Rather, I emerge from it better fitted for a higher society.

The unique nature of solitary couples with the solo nature of solitude, and this is–quite literally–a marriage made in heaven: a sanctuary whose intimacy offers soul-searching, wonder-witnessing, and general people-perfecting.

In his book, The Eternal Now, theologian Paul Tillich writes:

Our language has widely sensed the two sides of being alone. It 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.

In the sanctuary of solitary, One is not always the loneliest number; it just may be the most glorious number.