how to be alone

by Tanya Davis

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 could 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’s also the gym.
If you’re shy you can hang out with yourself in the mirrors, you can put headphones in.
And there’s public transportation
– because we all gotta go places –
and there’s prayer and meditation
no one will think less if you’re hanging out with your breath
seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple,
things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid-being-alone principles.
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers,
employees that 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’re eating solo dessert
and cleaning the whipped 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 is 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
(’cause they are probably not)
and, if they are, assume it is with best and human intentions,
the way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, 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,
there are always statues to talk to

and benches made for sitting
give strangers a shared existence
if only for a minute
and these moments can be so uplifting
and the conversations that 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 alone is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless
and lonely is healing if you make it.

You could 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’s 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 of those sappy slogans
from preschool over
to high school’s 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 be relieved,
keeps it interesting, life’s magic things in reach.

And it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, that community’s not present.
Just take the perspective you get
from being one person alone 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

when I met Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau, philosopher and poet of the 19th century (1837-1861), is genius. I’ve lately taken up to reading writings of famous authors and thinkers. Here are some of his thoughts:

On defining one’s own success:

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

advancing in the direction of your dreams:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

on confusing productivity with purposefulness:

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk. Why should the hen set all day? She can lay but one egg, and besides she will not have picked up materials for a new one. Those who work much do not work hard.

the spiritual practice of walking:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.