56 Sunsets – Surrendering to a Place and a Time of Solitude

by Carol Pearson

Liv Fun: Vol 3 – Issue 2

It wasn’t the first time I’d been alone. I’d traveled to London on business, flown cross-country on my own any number of times, and taken a weekend escape by myself now and then.

But this was different. This was an entirely new rabbit hole.

Officially and recently divorced, I was single and solo after 24 years of being married to my senior prom date. And I was about to spend two entire months in an 800-square-foot cottage on the Gulf of Mexico, just steps from the ocean on a little spit of sand called Cape San Blas.

Intentionally embracing our solitude (as opposed to simply experiencing our loneliness) has been shown to have specific benefits — namely, freedom, creativity, intimacy and spirituality. (Long & Averill, 2003)

My own quest was for inner peace — a cessation (even temporary) of the chorus of voices in my head that had an opinion on every action I took, every plan I made. I was desperate to find some inner quiet and turn off the committee that ruled and judged my life. I needed to rid myself of the underlying anxiety I’d been sparring with for years.

Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic novel, I felt I’d lost my true voice over the years and was speaking, acting and living to please the rest of the world — at the expense of myself.

“You’re not the same as you were before,” the Mad Hatter says to Alice. “You were much more … ‘muchier.’ You’ve lost your ‘muchness.’”

Maybe here I would get my “muchness” back.

After two days on the road, I pulled into the sand drive leading up to my little yellow fortress of solitude and had a moment of defiant glee.

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Liv Fun

by Leisure Care
Summer 2014
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by Tammy Kennon

“Land ho!” I shouted. “There’s an island on the horizon!” It was 1968, and I was 8 years old. To those outside my imagination, my sailboat looked like a willow tree and my ocean a bumpy stretch of Bermuda grass with a clothesline strung across it.
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Love’s Just Full of Surprises
by Skye Moody

It’s a love adventure like no other, and it’s spelled D-I-V-O-R-C-E. After 30 years of marriage, Lynn and Matt Harlow decide to call it quits. To family and close friends, including me, the news drops like a mega-bomb, its devastation all the greater because Matt and Lynn Harlow have for decades represented the miracle of sustained romantic love, while all along they were keeping its dying embers a closely guarded secret.
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56 Sunsets – Surrendering to a Place and a Time of Solitude
by Carol Pearson

It wasn’t the first time I’d been alone. Officially and recently divorced, I was single and solo after 24 years of being married to my senior prom date. And I was about to spend two entire months in an 800-square-foot cottage on the Gulf of Mexico, just steps from the ocean on a little spit of sand called Cape San Blas.

Read More