Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - It's Okay to Spend Time Alone - Taoism - Life Wisdom #61

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

"Alone" is a word we use every day that has changed its meaning under us, and I would like to spend some time with it, because the change explains a great deal about why so many of us feel the way we feel.More resources:Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My Substack Blog:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music I use, as a playlist:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist⁠⁠⁠⁠

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word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. There's a word we use every day that has quietly changed its meaning under us, and I would like to spend some time with it, because the change explains a great deal about why so many of us feel the way we feel. The word is alone, and if you say it now in your own head and notice what comes with it, you'll learn. You'll most of what I have to say before I say it. For most people, what arrives is a faint chill, a picture of an empty flat, a table set for one,

a phone that has not rung, the feeling of being left out of something happening elsewhere. Alone has become a word for lack, a word we say with a small downward turn at the end, a condition to be corrected as quickly as possible. It did not begin that way because the word is a contraction, and if you pull it apart, you find two older words pressed together over centuries of speech, all and one, so that to be alone once meant to be all one, not lacking or left out or missing anyone, but entire whole, complete in yourself. When our ancestors said a person was alone, they were not saying that something was absent. They were saying that for a moment nothing was divided.

And it is worth pausing on how strange it is that a word should travel that far, from wholeness to lack, because words do not change meaning by accident. They change when the thing they described stops happening often enough for people, to remember it. Somewhere along the way, the experience of being gathered into a single undivided self became rare enough that the word lost its footing and slid and came to rest on the only nearby thing people still recognized, which was the absence of company. We kept the sound and lost the meaning. And now we say alone and feel cold and have no word left. for the warm thing it used to name.

Except that the old meaning is not entirely gone, and you can still hear it if you listen to a small child. Watch a three-year-old take a spoon out of an adult's hand and say, with total seriousness, that she wants to do it alone, and notice that there is nothing sad in the word at all. She's not describing an absence of company, since the adult is right there and she is glad of it. She's describing a completeness, a sufficiency,

the discovery that she is enough to do this thing without being propped up. And the word arrives in her mouth exactly as it arrived in the mouths of people 800 years ago, meaning all one entire able. Somewhere between that spoon and adulthood, The word turns over, and we begin to say it with the chill in it, and I do not think we notice the day it happens. I want to hold that older meaning up against the life most of us now live, because the gap between the two is where we are living.

Picture a walk, not a special one, the kind you might take on a Sunday afternoon in late September, when the light has started to slant and you have an hour with nothing in it. You put on a coat and you leave the house. And before you have reached the end of the street, your hand has found your pocket and your thumb has found the screen and your ears are already full of someone else's voice. Nothing about this is wrong.

And I want to say that clearly, because the moment we start talking about phones and walks, a certain tone creeps in, a tone that makes people feel judged for doing what everyone does. And that tone helps no one. The voice in your ears is probably a good voice, and the podcast is probably interesting.

And you are learning something, or being kept company, or simply making the walk pass more pleasantly, and those are all reasonable things to want. But look at what has happened to the word. You are alone on this walk in the modern sense, since no one is beside you, and you are not for a single step of it, all one,

because you're divided, gently, and pleasantly, between the pavement under your feet and a conversation taking place in a studio in another city, between two people you have never met so that your body is in the September light while your attention is somewhere else entirely. And the thing the old word described,

the state of being undivided, gathered into a single place, has not happened and will not happen, because there is no gap in which it could. Now let me ask you to imagine the same walk without the voice. Most people asked to picture this, feel a small resistance,

and the resistance is worth noticing because it is the whole subject. The walk without the voice looks from here like a walk with something missing. It looks like the lesser walk, the boring one, the one you would only take if your battery had died. And that feeling is not a personal failing, but what a mind trained by years of constant input reasonably expects,

since silence has become, for most of us, a sign that something has gone wrong. So you take the walk anyway, without the voice, as an experiment. And for the first ten minutes, it is exactly as bad as you feared, because the mind casts about, reaching for the phone, and finding the pocket empty and not liking it at all, and it generates a list of things you should be doing instead. It replays a conversation from Thursday and finds a better thing you could have said.

It notices that you're bored, and boredom in an adult body has a particular flavor, restless and slightly ashamed, as if you had been caught doing nothing by something, by someone who would think less of you for it. It helps in those minutes to understand what the voice in your ears was actually doing for you because it was doing something real

and you will want it back. It was giving you a place to be that was not here. Every input, however good, is a small doorway out of the present moment and we have come to keep so many doors always open, at once, that we are almost never fully in any room. The podcast on the walk is not a distraction from the walk so much as a second location, and the mind which can only be in one place chooses the more populated one.

When you take the voice away, you're not removing entertainment. You're closing the last door, and the mind finding itself in a single room for the first time in a long while, panics in the way anyone panics when the exits disappear. And then, once it understands that nothing terrible is going to happen, begins to look around. There is a Taoist line about this that I have come to think is one of the most practical sentences in the tradition.

The Tao Te Ching says that a good traveller leaves, no tracks. It is usually read as a line about lightness, about moving through the world without damage, and it is that. But I hear something else in it now, which is that a walk that leaves no tracks is a walk that is not recorded with no photograph of the light and no step count, and no mention of it afterward to anyone, not even a note to yourself. A walk that happens. A walk that happens. and is then simply gone, held nowhere except in the person who took it. We have almost no experiences like that anymore. Nearly everything we do leaves a track of some kind,

a trace that someone could see, or that we could show, or that we could at least tell. And the tracks change the walk, not dramatically but just enough, so that you frame the light of fraction before you, you look at it. You notice a thought, and part of you has already begun arranging it for an audience. Even the things you never share are shaped by the fact that you could. I do not think most of us understand what that costs, because the cost is invisible and the payment is small and constant. A life in which everything leaves the track is a life lived slightly to one side,

of itself, always half turned toward an audience that may or may not be there. And a person who lives that way, for long enough, loses something they cannot name, which is the experience of being the only witness to their own life. Not the only one who matters, the only one who knows. There used to be hours in every day that belonged to no record at all, and those hours were where a person became themselves rather than a version of themselves arranged for viewing. And we have given them away without ever deciding to one small convenience at a time. Around the 15th minute of the walk without the voice, something shifts, and I want to describe it carefully,

because it is the part nobody tells you about. The casting around stops, not because you have disciplined it, but because the mind, having searched every pocket for input and found nothing, gives up looking and turns with a kind of reluctant curiosity toward what is actually there, which is the walk itself, the light, which has been doing something remarkable this whole time along the tops of the houses. The cold coming through your coat at the shoulder, the sound of your own feet, which you have not heard in years, because there has always been a voice over them. A thought you started on Tuesday, which has been waiting all week for a stretch of silence long enough to finish itself, and which now unhurried finishes.

This is what the old word meant by all one, nothing divided. Because you are on the walk and the walk is where you are, and for the length of it, there is no second place your attention is being sent to. No studio in another city, no audience arranged in your head, no track being laid down for later. There is a person walking in the light, and that is the whole of it, and it turns out to be enough, and the enough has a quality that is hard to describe to someone who has not felt it recently. A settledness.

A sense of having arrived somewhere. You did not know you had left. I've heard people describe the first time this happens to them as adults in strikingly similar words. They say it felt like coming home and that they had forgotten they had an inside. One woman told me, she stood at the end of a path

and realized she had not had a single thought about how to describe the walk to anyone, that this was the first time in years. She could remember an hour that belonged entirely to her, and she was surprised to find her eyes wet. What surprised her most, she said afterward, was that nothing had happened. There had been no revelation on the path,

no decision made, no problem solved. She had simply walked and had been for an hour the only one there. And the relief of that was so large and so unexpected that she understood for the first time how long she had been divided and how tired the division had made her. In a way she had been attributing to everything else. Now, someone will say, quite reasonably, that human beings are made for one another

and that all this talk of walking alone sounds like the beginning of a withdrawal, the kind that starts as depth and ends as absence. And they are right that we are made for one another. But I would ask them to notice what a person brings back from a walk like that. They bring back a finished thought and a feeling they were able to feel all the way to the bottom before it was narrated.

They bring back an hour that was theirs, and the strange steadiness that comes from having spent time as a single undivided person rather than as a switchboard. And when they sit down at dinner that evening, there is someone at the table. You can see it if you know what to look for. The person who has walked without the voice comes back through the door a little slower than usual and hangs up the coat

and does not immediately reach for the phone on the table by the door because the hunger for it has, for the moment, gone quiet. They ask a question at dinner and then actually wait for the answer since nothing in them is drafting a reply while the other person is still speaking. They mentioned something they noticed about the light, and it is not a performance of having noticed.

It is just a thing that happened to them that afternoon, and that they are now quite naturally handing across the table. The people around them cannot say what is different, and if asked, they would probably say that the person seems rested, which is close. But the truer word is that the person seems present, and present is what someone looks like when they have recently been all one.

That is the part the modern meaning of the word hides from us. We have come to believe that being alone takes us away from others, and so we avoid it and fill every gap and are never for a moment undivided. and then wonder why our connections feel thin and reach for more connection to fix the thinness, which only divides us further. The loneliest people I have known were not the ones who spent time by themselves.

They were the ones who never did, and who had therefore never become anyone in particular. And so there was no one there for anyone else to meet. The old word knew this, and it never opposed alone to together, because it understood that you can't be truly with anyone until you have first been all one gathered entire, and that the hour of silence was not a subtraction from your relationships, but the place where the person who has relationships gets made. And the second walk is easier than the first, which is not a subtraction from your relationships, but the place where the person who has relationships gets made. the part I most want you to know, because the first one is the only one anyone warns you about. Once you have been through the 15th minute and come out the other side, the mind remembers the way. The casting around still comes, but it comes shorter, and there's a part of you now that recognizes

it for what it is. The sound a door makes when it is closing, rather than that it is. It's a part of than the sound of something going wrong, and that part waits it out with something close to patience. By the fourth or fifth walk, the boredom has become almost a friend. The slightly awkward threshold you cross to get to the room you actually wanted, and you find yourself looking forward to the hour in a way that would have been unimaginable a month earlier. When the walk without the voice looked like the lesser walk and you could not have said why anyone would choose it. So I will not give you a practice today because the practice is already in the word and you already know how to do it. You know where your coat is and you know the street and you know which

pocket the phone lives in and you know what it would feel like to leave it on the table by the door, and to close that door, and to walk out into a September afternoon carrying nothing that could record you, and to be for an hour all one. The light is doing something along the tops of the houses right now, and it has been doing it the whole time, and you have only to go and be undivided in front of it.