Free How to Be Alone (School of Life) by Sara Maitland

in flux and transformation. To me this makes the amazing frequency with which people remember childhood moments of solitude in a positive and often romantic glow all the more interesting. It seems to suggest that as adults many of us have a deep and real longing for more solitude than we are presently getting.
    Such practices can, incidentally, throw up quite disturbing material. If this all becomes consistently more frightening than either pleasurable or interesting, it is worth checking whether you are actually exhaling enough (hyperventilation is easy to slip into and produces weird physical effects), and otherwise give yourself a break. I am not proposing this as necessary therapy, but as a rather effective way to enjoy solitude more. If it does not work, does not achieve this end for you, do something different.

4. Look at Nature
    By ‘look at nature’ I do not mean ‘get out into nature’ – although, as I have already suggested, this is a very good thing to do when you are alone. As I have described, one of the arguments deployed against those who want to be alone is that such a desire is ‘unnatural’.
    This is a complicated sort of accusation, made up of so many strands that it is quite difficult to unravel and examine it, and indeed it has built itself so deeply into our culture and ways of thought that we seldom even try to unravel and examine it. The word ‘natural’ has aggregated a confusingly wide range of meanings, some of which are in contradiction to each other. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary, along with sixteen other separate meanings for ‘natural’ as an adjective, defines it both as something ‘based upon the innate moral feeling of mankind; instinctively felt to be right and fair’ and as something ‘in a state of primitive development, not spiritually enlightened. Unenlightened, unregenerate.’
    Interestingly, until very recently one thing that ‘natural’ did not mean was ‘things like animals, trees, mountains and oceans’, although this is often the implication when people call something ‘unnatural’. We need to be alert to the implicit and conflicted moral judgement in the word itself because very often when people say something is ‘unnatural’, they really mean ‘I do not approve of it’.
    Nonetheless the idea that it is unnatural for human beings to be solitary is very ancient, and still exercises imaginative hold on many of us. When the Pentateuch – the first five books of Scripture which are held in common by the three Middle Eastern monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) – was given its final form, somewhere between 600 and 400 BC, the second version of the Creation story (Genesis 2) tells how the Lord God made Adam, breathed life into him and put him in the Garden of Eden alone (there were not even any animals at this point) but then came to the conclusion that ‘it is not good that the man should be alone’. In an attempt to provide Adam with a fitting companion, the Lord God then ‘formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man’. However, none of them seemed quite satisfactory, so the Lord God made a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs. And he was no longer alone. Quite why this one verse of Genesis has kept its resonance while the rest of the creation story has been militantly rejected is a bit mysterious.
    This particular story, and its explicit articulation that it is ‘not good’ for people to be alone, has been extremely influential, but it is not by any means unique; many other creation myths see the forming of human social units (often based on the sexually related couple, though sometimes on a sibling group) as a key moment in human development.
    These myths are endorsed by popular science. The idea that human beings are a social species is not simply firmly embedded in our culture; it is supported by evolutionary theory, social anthropology and archaeology. And obviously it does have some