Are you the Mystic in the Middle? Solitude, leadership, and the unknown

A few years ago, a study on solitude was published in Nature Scientific Reports exploring whether balancing alone time and social time increases overall wellbeing.

The research landscape is split: some studies highlight the upsides of being alone (more autonomy, less pressure, space for creativity), while others point to the downsides (loneliness, isolation).

In this study, it wasn’t simply the amount of alone time that predicted loneliness, but whether that amount was higher than usual for that person on a given day.

Other studies show that choice and beliefs about aloneness matter too. When people choose their alone time, it tends to feel more like positive solitude and less like isolation. If they’re exposed to negative messages about being alone, it increases their sense of loneliness after spending time alone.

Solitude has been associated with a number of benefits (like more calm, less stress, and a greater sense of inner-freedom) for those who choose it and don’t hold negative beliefs about it. 

If you enjoy solitude, you may also be the kind of person who displays traits like these:

• Making choices from your own values, not internalised conditioning

• Comfortable sitting with your own inner experience and ignoring distractions

• Staying spacious, self-compassionate and loving even if negative narratives arise

• Finding a sense of stillness beneath the layer of doubt and rumination

• Using solitude to create or contemplate, not just pass time

This had me wondering: these traits overlap with who we might call mystics—people who have a relationship with the unseen - an inner compass when there is no map. Their knowing goes deeper than rational thought. They see beyond the surface and read the room by being woven into it rather than on the edge analysing it. 

The difference between enjoying solitude and deeper mysticism might be that mystics are not pursuing wellbeing so they can have a better life (as important as that may be). They’re tending to a water source that quenches a thirst nothing else reaches while guiding their movements in the world.

Why is that relevant to anything?

Another trait of mystics is that they are supremely at ease with the unknown. It is very much the business of a mystic to trust the landscape to tell them what the map can’t. Anything that gives a sense of false control over life or nature is a dead end to a mystic. 

Three further things struck me:

• Many leaders and professionals in organisations have a sense of seeing beyond the surface of things (and may find it hard to articulate what it is to their more materially‑oriented colleagues).

• In these times of increased uncertainty—the world of “un‑order”, as the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations calls it— a mystical orientation may well align with leadership, transformational work, or strategic guidance roles.

• A mystic's greatest challenge is doubt and the dark night of the soul. How many service-oriented leaders doubt what their deeper intelligence tells them and become paralysed in a storm of their own making… A mystic knows that navigating the inner storm is part of the path and their work is sorting the signal from the static of their inner voices.

One problem for mystics today is that there is no corporate development programme for mystics—and likely never could be (though there is a book called The Corporate Mystic that had some success with organisational leaders decades ago).

So mystics have to fall back on what mystics of all ages have done: solitude; trust in something more than what is seen, measurable, and controllable; and connection with other mystics, sanctuaries, and mystical schools.

This is something that makes complete sense to me.

If you recognise some of the traits above, you may be an everyday mystic. And if your mysticism works in everyday life, through your presence and deeper intelligence, then you may well be a Mystic in the Middle—not the mystic in a cave or monastery, but one walking amid the world without getting lost in it. You carry your monastery within you, its walls created by your attention and intention.

[Photo: Mystic, philosopher, and activist Simone Weil in high school.]

Question: How do you tend to use solitude this season? To get away from things (people, stimulation); to do things you want; to go with the flow of the moment?

Practice: Create white space in your diary - it’s your monastery. An hour a week of protected, device-free Executive Time (or Mystic in the Middle time), with a notebook, has created a much more aligned reality for many clients.

Have a great week,

Amina