How to Be Alone

push your own boundaries in the expectation of having a new kind of fun. The rewards are a double freedom – the freedom of knowing yourself and pleasing yourself beyond your old comfort zone, and a deeper sense of achievement.

governing’ (freedom to). In order to achieve this second sort of freedom she suggests that you need a ‘genuine sense of what your life is and can become’. That is to say, you need a consciousness of yourself, and we have already seen how solitude enhances and develops that self-awareness which is the first step towards being self-governing.

In addition to looking at how you spend your leisure time, it is also interesting to look at your own ‘maintenance’ time. This is partly because household maintenance is something that not only can be, but often is, done alone. If you are trying to find time for solitude, you may already have it if you stop seeing vacuuming as a disagreeable task a

a mental store of beautiful or useful items offers security, frees one from complete dependence on oneself and appears to aid balance and sanity in solitude.

‘You have to practise letting go of the inner chatter that can get in the way of what you want to accomplish,’

I use this little tent just whenever I feel the need to take off, alone, for whatever reason. For me, it works like a battery charger when I feel weighed down by the burdens of living in community and am dragging my feet. Actually I don’t use it very much, but knowing it’s there to use if I want to is sometimes enough in itself to bring a spring ba

a well-stocked mind enhances creativity,

The gods of our ancestors were, on the whole, gods of the wild places;

Solitude can happen to anyone: we are all at risk.