Solitude, Taken On

The word solitude carries something lonely in its sound.

Being alone. Going unseen. The distance that opens up between you and other people. These are the things we tend to call solitude. But real solitude, I think, is something far more active.

Not a state of being left behind by someone, but something you take on yourself. Stepping a little away from other people's eyes, from their judgment, from the safe road the world has laid out for you, and deciding to stand on your own feet. The quietness that arrives in that moment may be what solitude really is.

We are always drawn toward the safe place.

I am not much of anyone.

I know my limits.

Said that way, it sounds very humble.

But hidden beneath those words there is often a quiet calculation, a way of not getting hurt. Rather than trying and failing, you decide in advance to estimate yourself small. It is safer. No one laughs at you. And yet, is that really humility?

If anything, deciding on your own to set your possibilities low may be the more arrogant thing.

When a person begins to measure their life by someone else's standard, they slowly lose their own story. The shape of the people who succeed. The shape that earns approval. The shape that avoids being disliked. Tracing those shapes, your own outline grows faint without your noticing.

To be truly alone, I think, is to stop living on those substitutes.

Not a safe copy of someone else's life, but taking on the precarious thing inside you. Looking less at whether you are understood, and more at what you want to stake yourself on right now. Of course there is anxiety in that. There is shame. There is the chance of failing.

But a person who stays only in places without danger grows old, little by little.

This is not about age.

It is about the spirit.

The moment you stop taking risks, you grow old even while young. You meet something new and already wear the face of someone who understands it. You keep your distance before you can be hurt. You think about how you look to others before you listen to the impulse inside you. And while you do this, the heat that once lived deep in you cools, little by little.

Purity, I think, is not a clean and innocent state.

It lives instead in the figure of someone who cannot quite avoid being misunderstood, and still moves toward what they want to do. Holding what you cannot explain well, still unexplained. Not arranging yourself too neatly to be understood, but offering up the chaos inside you as it is.

This is a little different from being a good person, or a modest one, in the ordinary sense.

In Japan, bowing your head and staying modest are often treated as virtues. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. But sometimes a small calculation slips into that humility.

Humility to put the other person at ease.

Humility to avoid being disliked.

Humility to avoid colliding with anything in earnest.

On the surface, these look calm. But something is clouded underneath. While making yourself look small, you may only be watching the world from a safe place.

Here there is one thing I want to set apart.

Toward people, I never want to lose my humility. There is no reason anywhere to be arrogant toward another person. To bow your head. To respect the other. To admit there are things you still cannot see. These are things I do not think we should ever let go of.

But toward art, and toward work, I feel we must not be humble.

To decide in advance that this is your limit, and pull back. To set your own ceiling, telling yourself this is good enough. To run before giving your full effort, certain it will never amount to much. That wears the face of humility, while in truth it may only be looking away from your own work.

To respect another person, and to estimate your own possibilities as low. These two things, I think, are not the same at all.

What art needs is not that well arranged attitude.

Having skill. Having knowledge. Being able to make it look good. These matter too, of course. But the essence of art feels like it lies somewhere closer in.

How to live as a human being.

How to bring your own life out into the world.

It is close to that single point.

What does it mean to live as a human being. Sometimes I think about it this way. Suppose that one day your work, your family, your money, your friends, everything you have held dear, all of it were gone. Nothing left to protect. Nothing to be proud of. Nothing to show anyone.

In that moment, what is still left inside you?

What remains there to the very end is, I think, what a person's resolve truly is. Not a title, not approval, not anything you own. The thing that goes on standing, unextinguished, after everything has peeled away.

Art, perhaps, is bringing that bare part out into the open without hiding it.

A reason to live, I think, is not something handed to you gently. It may be born from the contradiction and the friction inside you. You draw because you are lost. You give things form because they cannot be neatly resolved. You move your hands because there are things you cannot put into words.

Try too hard to live cleanly, and life grows weak.

It is fine to be more contradictory.

Fine to be more precarious.

Fine to know less of your own limits.

Before you decide that this is all you are, stake yourself on the thing inside you that still has no name. Real expression, I think, can only begin from the place where you take that solitude on.

Solitude is not being lonely on your own.

It is carrying the life that no one can live in your place, as your own.

It is stepping down from the safe place and taking one step toward danger.

It is keeping the fire inside you lit, even while you are misunderstood.

As long as that fire is there, a person has not yet grown old.

And bringing that fire out into the world is, I am sure, what art is.

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