Splendid Isolation- How I Stopped Time by Sitting in a Forest for 24 Hours⁠↗

This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.

This is a practice commonly referred to as a “wilderness solo”. The basic principle is that you go out into nature, the wilder and more remote the better, and confine yourself to one very small area for a set period – a day, two days, three days, sometimes longer. During this period, you forego anything that might come between yourself and your own solitude. No phone. No books or other reading material. You don’t build a fire, because building a fire is a way to keep yourself busy, watching the dance of its flames a primitive entertainment. Most participants choose not to bring food, because when you have got nothing to do for a day and a night, the prospect of eating a sandwich can easily become an all-encompassing preoccupation, undermining the entire project of unmediated communion with nature. After that period of immersion, you step outside of your circle, and you re-enter the world.

The experience of the solo is the experience of time itself, in its rawest and most unmediated form.

There was an extraordinary transformative power, he insisted, in the practice of sitting and doing nothing, and thereby slowing your mind and body to a meditative rhythm in nature.

What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it.

And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time – from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing you’re doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing – you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament.

At some point it came to my attention that I was no longer bored, and that I had not been bored for some time. This is not to say that I was in a state of high mental stimulation, but that the hours of inactivity had induced in me a kind of meditative stupor, whereby I was receptive to the information of the environment – to the ceaseless clamour of the river, the chattering of the birds overhead, the urgent whisperings of the leaves in the breeze, the modulations of temperature and light – but uninclined to think much about this information, or anything else. I had, I realised, become attuned to the frequencies of the forest. I had found the secret level.

I felt simultaneously closer to myself as a child than I had in all the years of adulthood, and yet that sudden closeness came as an experience of loss, of immeasurable distance. It was as though time had folded in on itself, and the present was touching the past. There I was, as close to 40 as made no difference, alone in a forest on a moonless night and weeping with cathartic abandon at the sight of a threadbare stuffed animal. I was mourning my childhood, and the mourning felt long overdue.