Listening to a seminar on the founding of the country, I’m reminded of how few people inhabited the early United States, including native Americans. Even Europe and other continents included tracts of empty land.

Still, solitude may not have been easy to find. Long hours of labor, larger families crowded into smaller houses, neighborly needs—perhaps earlier folk strived for solitude as much as we do.

Solitude is a conscious decision to remove oneself from noise and chatter and simply to think, or to read slowly and reflect. Solitude should not be confused with loneliness, though the confusion may be one reason solitude is neglected.

If solitude today is harder to find, it’s not only because population has increased significantly. I live in a semi-rural area where it’s still possible to walk away from my community into wooded areas. Driving my car for a short time, I can find trails where I can walk for an hour or two and not meet another person.

But we now have phones and carry them with us wherever we go. Some of us wake up and immediately check those phones. We get the news, good and bad, but mostly bad, before we’ve had breakfast.

Maybe this busy, hard-wired way of life will change our brains, and we will no longer need solitude. I tend to doubt that. I suspect solitude, to varying degrees according to our personalities, is as important to inner growth as food is to our physical bodies.

We are not merely flesh and bones. We also require spiritual feeding and sometimes must search for it.