The sense of being the only one standing up for righteousness, wondering if you’re the only one in the classroom getting it, is a sense which could easily trap an individual.
Who are you to think of yourself as the only, as the lone witty one, as the only upright one?!
How can you stand confident in solitude when there is a mob approaching closer by the second, aiming at your self-righteous effort of calling out fallacies and pointing people (at the very least yourself) towards truth?
Our society is so upside down we think of solitude as a weakness or a cuss word. Something to be solved for (via a phone or internet connection) and not embraced or worked on.
I wrote an entire four part series on the Strength In Solitude so I won’t go too far into a refresher, but suffice to say solitude has a bad wrap and is very misunderstood as a virtue.
Proper solitude doesn’t mean you are alone. And proper solitude means you are drawing strength and understanding from God, your surroundings, the well thought out writings of others, maximizing what is present in your reality and not the distant-unknown or not-yet.
Which is how, as it turns out, it can seem like standing firm in solitude turns into an echo chamber:
- You’re the only one working out in your fitness challenge group.
- You’re the only one reading your Bible In A Year plan you teamed up with others to do.
- You’re the only one going above and beyond for the task at hand at work.
- You’re the only one showing up early to straighten the room out, clean up from the night before, prepare it like it’s your own home, and serve customers like they are your loved ones.
The echo chamber aiming at you is you. You’re coming after you.
You’re the one who, through a humble confidence properly rooted in solitude, embarks on what needs to be done because there is no choice otherwise. Hence you arrive at an echo chamber which has a better connotation this time around. Not the type of potential negative formations expressed in this Psychology Today article about online echo chambers.
Instead, you’ve planted an echo chamber of good habits. Formed over and over. Daily, hourly, something set to a rhythm more frequent than on a whim or when you feel like it.
Finally, addressing what happens when the echo chamber’s contents are self-help gurus (a slightly derogatory descriptor), or, say, ‘people who have produced great results doing things over and over which solved a major issue in their life and now they report back all the findings of said problem solved for anyone with ears to hear.’ That’s longer for sure but better than self-help.
Create an echo chamber of good mantras, solid habits, efforts to find the best intentions and not the worst. Create unbroken, healed, or resolved Soundtracks as Jon Acuff would put it. Do these things in abundance over time. Daily and hourly. And then sit back and find out if the cynics have it more correct or the encouragers.
If the cynics still provide you more comfort and safety, by all means, repeat those echos over and over in your head.
But if you find the amplified echo chamber of solitude rooted in wisdom and problem solving as the better location, you’ll begin cultivating the solitude we all have access to as a more fruitful chamber, echoing the best we have to offer till it continually spills over outward into our lives.
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