Tips For Newbie Hermits

So we’re all hermits now—to a greater or lesser degree, and not all of us, it would seem. Some are scrupulous, even obsessive, about sequestration and “self-isolation”; but others are cavalier, with a devil-may-care, devil-take-the-hindmost  “I am immortal” attitude.​

In the “cavalier” camp definitely go the surprising number of people who just seem not to think about it. And I’m never-endingly amazed at seeing people getting together in clumps, maskless, rubbing elbows, embracing each other, apparently oblivious or feeling impervious or invincible or just flat-out not caring about everything we know now about the spread of this pernicious pandemic.

Many of us have “social distancing fatigue” as one public-health official put it. And mask fatigue, hand-washing fatigue, and above all “self-isolation fatigue.”

No surprise: It’s in our nature to be social. “Man is a political animal,” Aristotle said, by which he meant not that we all secretly yearn to run for office, but that it’s in our nature to be part of a polis, or community—and that this urge is not taught by society, but innate.

We’re going against thousands of years of DNA programming by staying home: since hunter-gatherer times we’ve been gathering around fires, in marketplaces, coliseums, cafes, parties, houses of worship—anywhere and as often as we could, for whatever reason, under whatever pretext.

Before the pandemic hit, I was always struck by this whenever I went to the neighbourhood farmers’ market, everyone standing around and trading information, gossip, how’s-your-kid-type chit-chat.

I always just wanted to grab my over-priced veggies and get the hell out of there. But all my neighbours loved to stand around and yak. I recognized the ancient pull of the marketplace, the gathering spot.

***

​But now, thanks to this pestilential pandemic, a lot of us are still spending a lot of time holed up in our domiciles: working from home, shopping from home, binge-watching, cooking, baking, doing artsy-crafty things, and all the rest of it. Tearing Covid-shaggy hair out as kids climb the wall, yearning for the days of hugs and haircuts, well-attended weddings and funerals, going to restaurants and parks and cafes.

Me, I say: embrace the solitude.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say. I’m a writer. Most of my life I’ve worked from home, so it’s not a big lifestyle change for me.

My daily routine before pandemic: wake up; drink coffee; type; make lunch; type some more; press “send”; maybe work out, maybe have nap; make dinner; watch TV; read; sleep. In the morning repeat…

​My daily routine after pandemic: wake up; drink coffee; type; make lunch; eat lunch; type some more; press “send”; maybe work out, maybe have nap; make dinner; eat dinner; watch TV; read; sleep. In the morning repeat…

So: Me = grizzled veteran of the home front. You = newbie, grunt, greenhorn, fresh meat. So please let me as a PSA share my thoughts on how to cope. As always, as we should all always take care to do, I can only say to you what worked for me. Take or leave whatever you want. Use what is useful; chuck the rest.

***​

I take a real “back to the lab” attitude to the whole self-isolation situation.

​(And p.s. when I talk about my daily routine, I did also go to meetings, forgather with other humans for lunch, dinner, drinks, and whatnot. But now the isolation factor has ramped up, even for me.)

​Do I, even at my age (which is none of your business: suffice to say I have two post-teen and one teen son), have numerous areas in my personal, professional, physical, and spiritual life needing urgent improvement? I do, maybe even more so than most.

Let’s start with the physical. I live across the street from a community centre with a gym in the basement, including cross-trainers, stationary bikes, weights, medicine balls, the whole nine. I could throw a Frisbee™ from my front porch and hit this community centre, so I’ve never had any excuse.

​But now the community centre has been converted into a homeless shelter. I’m happy about it because a) I’m happy they can offer a roof to keep the rain off the heads of those who need it in these parlous times; b) I don’t have to feel guilty about not working out on a daily or semi-daily basis.

And yet the guilt remains. So I ordered a book called Solitary Fitness, by Charles Bronson—not the movie vigilante, but the notorious British ultra-villain (played by Tom Hardy in the biopic). Sent to prison for an armed robbery that netted him 36 pounds, he committed so many crimes behind bars (along with all the shiv-ings, choke-outs and assaults, he kept kidnapping people, which isn’t easy in prison: once he kidnapped the prison librarian and demanded a rubber doll, a helicopter, and a cup of tea; another time he kidnapped two Iraqi convicts, laughed and sang the whole time, and demanded they tickle his feet), he wound up spending, with a couple of reprieves amounting to only a few weeks, in solitary confinement for 36 years.

He spent the time exercising. Madman he may be (twice diagnosed as a sociopath by prison doctors), but I find his fitness program oddly inspiring. Using only four walls, floor, towel, and a chair, he (in his sixties now) has become superhumanly strong. Wakes up, plunges his face in a bowl of cold water, and quickly knocks off 100 rat-a-tat pushups. Along with sit-ups, squats, lunges, plank, and other excercises and stretches too numerous to mention, he does 3,000-6,000 push-ups—which he, being British, calls “press-ups”—a day; sometimes, “when I’m lucky enough to be let out into the yard,” with one or two other convicts on his back. In between, he endlessly paces his 8’ X 12’ cell in between.

​I’ve seen footage of him endlessly pacing, flexing and unflexing his hands. “If I had a garden I’d do it out there,” says—and that’s where you’ll find me, several times a day, pacing around my patio table, flexing and unflexing my hands, then dropping every now and then to do some (assisted by a bench: it’s early days), push-ups, squats and so forth.

I’m getting stronger every day, here in lockdown, I can feel it. Not doing 3,000 “press-ups,” never with anyone on my back (that would be the end of my back). Sometimes it’s a “BTN,” “better than nothing,” workout, but hey: every little bit counts. Anything is “better than nothing.”

***

Spiritually, I take great inspiration from another book, Hermits: The Insights of Solitude, by Peter France. France was a well-known BBC-TV producer who chucked it all to live an eremitical existence on the Greek island of Patmos. He spent his now-copious time writing this book, a history of eremitism from The Desert Fathers (early Christian hermits who retreated to the desert to seek enlightenment) to Henry David Thoreau to rich playboy-turned-monk-turned-hermit Charles De Foucauld to Thomas Merton, author of the classic paean to the solitary existence, The Seven Storey Mountain.

(I even tried to urge this book on my climbing-the-walls, stir-crazy teen and post-teen male offspring. Tough sell to anyone of that age: they’re pack animals, like wolves. A time of solitude and reflection is antithetical to their natures. Still, I gave it a shot.)

The Desert Fathers are my favourite. They sought salvation in solitude—not in some ethereal afterlife, but during this life, a state they believed uninterrupted by death.

They kept mostly quiet about…well, pretty much everything, believing “just as if you leave open the door of the public baths the steam escapes and the virtue is lost, so the virtue of a person who talks a lot escapes the open doors of the voice.” Some of their sayings, called “apopthegmata,” survive, and they are like lightning flashes of truth and illumination. “These stories of how they dealt with each other and the problems they faced have come down to us with all the unvarnished directness of campfire tales,” Mr. France writes. Another writer describes the apopthegmata of The Desert Fathers as “like the flash of a signaling lamp—brief, arresting, and intense.” I urge them on anyone seeking wisdom: they will repay many readings.  ​

But it wasn’t anything they said, or even really did: it was more their comportment. As the historian Helen Waddell wrote: “Of the depth of their spiritual experience they had little to say… It was their humility, their gentleness, their heartbreaking courtesy that was the seal of their sanctity to their contemporaries, far beyond abstinence, and miracle, or sign.”

​And that’s the main thing I’m trying to accomplish during this global experiment with enforced eremitism and my own personal experiment with self-improvement in isolation: to teach myself to treat my contemporaries as far as possible with humility, gentleness, and “heartbreaking courtesy.”

​It’s only been a couple of months now. But I have to say: so far it’s working great!