Truly being alone

[Lightspeed]

In the here and now I'm moderately comfortable with my own company. That's because I have reliable neighbours a few hundred yards away, and technology that will deliver me to civilization, or allow me to contact other humans whenever I wish (like via this e-mail)

Truly living alone is another matter entirely. Without any human contact whatsoever I would find it very difficult..... I hope not impossible, but very challenging, that's for sure.

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Some more thoughts:


When we first arrived at this location the silence in the environment was deafening….some of us took a while to come to terms with it.

But now we're acclimatised to it, its not so silent and isolated as it first appeared. Now we are much more tuned into the subtleties of the aural environment I can hear human activity for many many, miles around. This has developed to the point of being able to accurately identify individual tractor engines, where they are on the landscape and where their owners are heading. Likewise the buzz of chainsaws can be fairly accurately pin-pointed to areas of the forest with me having a pretty good idea of who’s doing what and where. Would you believe that felled pines can be heard crashing to the ground from over 1km away? Sounds of rifle and shotgun fire are easily heard over a vast range, but harder to direction find due to echos off the landscape.

Last Saturday, around 06.30 a strange noise spooked one of our cats, which alerted me to it too…it turned out to be an hot air balloon at least 4 miles away, but the sound of its burners reached me easily in the cool dense air.

I could give many more examples. The point is, that although quite isolated from other people here, we are not truly isolated and certainly not alone.

Another danger of being alone is sickness. A bout of flu at the end of last winter pretty much incapacitated me for a week, and for several weeks afterwards very weak . With outdoor temperatures of -10C I was unable to keep the log burner going, let alone go out and chop wood. Fortunately I had laid up a big enough pile of converted fire-wood and my wife was able to both take care of heating and also keep me fed watered and comfortable. This same event, if I were totally alone could have been a killer.

There’s more to being truly alone than just lack of chatter, be it in person or over electronic mediums.

Good for bringing this up S13, it’s a threat that I had not specifically identified until now.