“Solitude enables you to make contact with yourself.”
How much time do you spend in solitude? Not merely being by yourself, but in a condition where your mind is engaged in thinking its own thoughts, not reacting to the thoughts of others? Watching TV, reading, listening to podcasts, etc., may be done while alone, but it’s not the same as solitude because your mind is engaged with stuff coming from the minds of other people. Solitude is a conversation with yourself that allows you to recoup from the digital sensory assault of modern life and attempt to make sense of the world and your place in it.
Sertillanges, quoted above from his book The Intellectual Life, goes on to say that solitude is “a necessity if you want to realize yourself - not to repeat like a parrot a few acquired formulas, but to be the prophet of the God within you who speaks a unique language to each man.” We each need solitude so that we can know ourselves enough to bring something of our true selves to others and not merely repeat what we’ve heard elsewhere.
Our technological age has made solitude something that has to be carved out from the incessant connectivity of cyberspace and carefully cultivated and guarded. You are there inside yourself somewhere, turn off the other voices and see what you have to say.