Because much of my teaching is done online, days can pass when I don’t need to leave the house, swaths of time when my company is limited to my dogs and my partner. As a bona fide introvert who craves and thrives on solitude, I am, nonetheless, aware of the razor thin line between peaceful solitude and hermetic isolation. For most people, even introverts, being with others can serve as a tonic for depression and help repel the formation of undesirable eccentricities. I know that I’ve worried about friends who were in between jobs, both for the financial impact on them and the loss of socialization. It’s just too easy to develop weird habits when we lack some gentle, but compulsory, social accountability.
My current strategy is based on anticipating this danger so that I never have to find the willpower to react to it. And so I now maintain my habit of leaving the house most days, in the same way I maintain the ritual of brushing my teeth. I like having clean teeth, of course, but I also find value in the habitual practice of it. For those who groom mainly as a precursor for going to work — which may well be most people — respecting the disciplined practice of caring for one’s hair and body — and not just the aesthetic benefits — can make all the difference.
An especially spiritual, disciplined person could follow the model of traditional yoginis who, I’m told, cleanse themselves before their sweaty practice as a demonstration of their commitment and purity of heart. The cleansing becomes a kind of boundary between the profane and the sacred. To this end, maintaining a discrete online workspace — mine is a neat corner desk in a catch-all room of my house — can lend a healthy sense of formality to our home computer work. It’s similar to how avoiding eating and watching tv in bed can apparently support good sleep hygiene. Since I’m not quite yogini material, and can find it hard to ditch the sweatpants if I’m not leaving the house, I usually leave. I pack up my laptop and head for my campus office, the library, or a coffee shop.
The point is that inertia and human nature being what they are, working in isolation can become both addictive and crazy-making. Never mind the bodily damage we do with the typical posture and visual focus required for computer work, the potential psychological degradation is probably at least as profound. In short, I worry some about my capacity to become even weirder and more neurotic than I am, like those teen-aged boys who have reportedly starved to death rather than tear themselves away from their Playstation screens.
We all know about the tonic power of getting up and out, of seeing others and being seen by them, but if you’re like me you’ll be tempted to make exceptions for yourself: “But I’m a genuine introvert without typical social needs, so I’ll be fine.” “I’ll keep my eye on it and adjust my schedule if I start to hole up.” But we can’t rely on our own good sense to know when we’ve gotten too isolated because our judgment is the very thing that becomes damaged by that isolation.
My proof for this erosion of judgment is dramatic. A while back, my partner, not one to critique my style, pointed out that I was dangerously close to rocking a mullet. She didn’t use the m-word, but we both knew what “kind of shaggy in the back” meant. My journey to this new low — I think it’s called bottoming out — had begun innocently enough. I’d simply postponed my haircut because, you know, I didn’t really get out all that much. And then I postponed it again. My journey to a mullet began with a single indolent sigh.
The Virtual Pedagogue 
I had a flashback to grad school as I read this. Either I’m imagining it, or Kierkegaard is hiding in here somewhere. And why is it so easy to be lazy, both in our daily routines and existentially? Gulp. You are making me think about all the ways we let fear (of things not actually very scary) weigh us down like lead. We’ll have to do something about that, won’t we, Cathryn? 😉 Cheers to you!!
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