My original plan was to include quite a few people from the various places I visited on my travels. But then after much thought (carried out mostly while travelling) I lapsed onto the theme of solitude and what it means to be on your own. I am not talking about loneliness, but instead having the state of being alone forced upon you by your environment. Enjoying being alone and distancing yourself from other people is pretty much the status of an introvert. Yet it can also be that being alone isn’t from choice, but because people simply are not around. From a time not that long ago, we had to distance ourselves socially and physically from others. We had to hide what was the most expressive and communicative part of our body from others and I think this is what a lot of people missed. You had to work from home, you couldn’t travel, not even to be in someone else’s home. My graded unit is not about that but what I now feel has certainly shown the connotations of the effect that has had on people. They have found contentment in solitude that perhaps they’d never have forced upon themselves. They are finding that there is value in that moment. Of being there alone feeling the buzz of knowing this vista exists only for them – no one else is seeing what they are seeing. What the world is giving them to look upon is theirs.
This is the gift of Solitude.
You could say I am showing the desolation more than the solitude, but I am still there, travelling and observing, capturing, and expressing both sides of Scotland… just at a time of day that most people aren’t!
P.S. I got an A for this Unit.
