“Prison, I bless you!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, noted author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” once wrote those lines while in jail, just before he won the Nobel Prize.
He was blessed in jail. In the agony, painful aloneness of imprisonment, he found God and his usableness to Him.
There is the paradox!
You can bless your problem. You can bless your wound. You can bless your loneliness.
Before my work as a psychotherapist, I felt I had wasted years. I was a troubled individual since youth. I credit my turnaround in life to my years of loneliness and self-healing.
As Dr. Calvin Miller put it, “Character itself is often the gift of aloneness.”
In the heaviness of a crisis, you can choose to like being alone. You cannot like yourself and know your gift unless you do spend time alone.
Possibly, like Solzhenitzyn, you’ll someday look back on a productive life and say, “Prison, I bless you!”
Great men and women all knew how to be alone. They knew how to celebrate who they are.
It’s small wonder that from aloneness came the Einsteins, the Gandhis, the Jobs, the Bezos, the Mandelas, the apostle Pauls of human history.
The quiet life is amazing. It’s full of treasures. It’s where you can find your depths, your confidence, direction, and self-worth.
Enduring trauma and healing from it is always lonely work. You can feel so alone. Yet paradoxically, it can profit you.
When you’re alone, that’s when you discover who you really are. And how you can be greater than ever before.
