Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

Nothing is more destructive of warm relations than the person who endlessly ‘doesn’t mind’.

a well-stocked mind enhances creativity,

most people do not have a single consistent style of responding, but are more introverted or extroverted in different contexts or moods,

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.

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

asking people why they like being alone or what they get out of it (and of course listening to their answers) is one very effective way of learning about being alone and enjoying it.

You are one of those courageous people who want to dare to live; and to do so believe you have to explore the depths of yourself, undistracted and unprotected by social conventions and norms.