I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I need a lot of alone time.

I know this about myself, and I've done my best to build a life that protects that need.

Yes, I'm a solo parent of two children, so I'm not alone much in the evenings.

Yes, I've lived in the same city all my life, so it's not easy for me to be alone in public,

to sit at a coffee shop, to do some writing, or to have a meal,

or see a concert by myself. I'm always running into people I know, high school classmates,

former college professors, former students, old neighbors, and even relatives.

But I work from home each day, so I've given myself a buffer of several hours every day when I'm mostly by myself.

Sometimes there are meetings, in person, or virtual, but for the most part, while my children are at school, I get a decent stretch of solo time. I remember when I left my day job almost 15 years ago to work from home as a

freelancer, a co-worker said, aren't you going to get lonely? I laughed, No offense but no. Anyone who thought I'd be lonely

didn't know me very well. I get it, though. It's a double-edged sword. On one hand, many of us

crave and require solitude to write, to read, to concentrate, but sometimes prolonged

apartness from others can make you feel a little feral. So many of us got a taste of this

during lockdown in 2020, parents, children, co-workers, neighbors. I think we all had to learn

how to live in our bubbles, separated from many of the people and places we loved, and then we had to

relearn how to enter the world once lockdown was over. There is such a thing as too much solitude,

too much separation from others.

All things in moderation, I suppose.

Today's poem is by one of my favorite poets,

the late Stanley Plumley.

Maybe more than anyone else in my life, Stan understood the double bind of deep solitude,

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