Driving back home the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I was reminded of a truth that I catch up with at this time of year. Nothing says lonely better than a late November, early December drive on that stretch of Interstate 55 between Saint Louis and my hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Standing lonely sentinel, stripped down to their bones, stray oaks dot the edges of barren cornfields. Their craggy fingers, search, but fail to find a sun gone missing for weeks by now. A whiteness, that yields no snow, stretches like a fallow canvas across a sunless sky. The soundtrack to this landscape? A lone piano with plenty of space in between each note, or the high, lonesome voice of bluegrass’s founder, Bill Monroe. The painter? The prairie artist, Andrew Wyeth, of course. The philosopher or poet? Pick your existentialist.
When it comes to landscapes like these, most of us like to know just where the police are located. We turn up the equivalent of the car’s radio. We attempt to fly through it, or over it as best we can. I have a history of some pretty stout speeding fines to prove it.
A few years ago, my wife and I took a Fall vacation-retreat where the remains of a 19th century experiment in Christian utopian society are preserved in New Harmony, Indiana. One of the updated features to this inn-retreat-grounds is the outdoor roofless chapel designed by the famous modernist architect, Philip Johnson. The stone walls that define the worship space, give way to windows that look out on the very landscape I have been speeding through to escape for many decades. With nothing much else to do, slowly, slowly, I began to look over a spare and stark beauty that I had overlooked before.
Viktor Frankl, like the architect of that chapel, has provided a window into a dimension of the human condition that many of us have tried to avoid. Frankl, the founder of existentialist psychology, described in his research a kind of Sunday afternoon ennui or emotional disquiet “which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest” (from Man’s Search for Meaning). Rather than rushing through this kind of interior landscape, or attempting to distract oneself, according to Frankl, this is the time to slow down, pick up a journal, and reflect. This is the stretch of the journey where questions of meaning can be explored. This is precisely the territory where a reckoning between one’s stated goals, and how they’re being lived out can take place. This is the privileged terrain where the truth of the aphorism, “my work is not my worth” can be absorbed.
Questions for Conversation
When was the last time you leaned into the disquiet to see what it might be trying to reveal to you?
When was the last time you intentionally took your foot off of the accelerator and reduced distractions to really listen to your heart?
Can you distinguish between needless anxiety versus an inner disquiet that is inviting you to introspection?
Have you ever found beauty in a stark landscape?
Have you ever found beauty in a stark time in your life?
Do you know how to transform loneliness into solitude?