Being Alone

It is worth pausing to draw a distinction that the English language tends to blur. Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing, and confusing them makes both harder to understand.

Solitude is the experience of being alone without feeling lonely. It is a positive state - one in which you are present with your own inner life and finding that presence genuinely rewarding. The introspective mind, given space and quiet, is capable of extraordinary things: insight, creativity, self-knowledge, a sense of peace that the noise of social life rarely permits. Solitude, properly understood, is not a deprivation but a resource.

Loneliness, by contrast, is a state of painful disconnection. It is the condition of wanting to be with others and being unable to, for whatever reason - circumstantial, psychological, or both. It carries with it a quality of sadness, sometimes of shame, that solitude does not.

The crucial point - and the one on which this entire book rests - is that what you experience when you are by yourself is not fixed. It is, to a very considerable degree, something you can learn to shape and even govern. As Shakespeare's Hamlet observed with characteristic precision, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. The aloneness itself is neutral. It is the meaning we assign to it that determines whether we experience it as solitude or as loneliness - and meaning, unlike circumstance, is something we can change.