How To Be Alone

If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places - the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper. Where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway, so it’s safe there. There is also the gym. If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors. You can put headphones in. And there’s public transportation, because we all got to go places. And there’s prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.

(written and performed by Tanya Davis)

The lunch counter. Where you will be surrounded by “chow downers.” Employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town. And so they, like you, will be alone. Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone. When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run,” take yourself out for dinner - a restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were. Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching, because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best inhuman intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, afterall, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back like a brook of blessings.

Go to the woods alone. And the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city. Roam the streets. They are always statues to talk to. And benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute. And these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless. And lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner. Look both further and farther in the endless quest for company. But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts some essence of them may be lost. Or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself. Perhaps all those sappy slogans from pre-school over to high school groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. ‘Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you. All experiences unique. No one has the same synapses. Can’t think like you. For this we’re relieved. Keeps things interesting. Life’s magic brings much. And it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected. The community is not present. Just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. Take silence and respect it. If you have an art that needs a practice stop neglecting it. If your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it. You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it. If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it. There is heat in freezing be a testament.