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

identified by researchers. One of the most common of these is a loud ‘hoot’, which can be heard for at least half a mile (0.8 km): obviously you do not need to communicate audibly over such a distance if you are never separate from the rest of your social group.
    Gorillas also sleep alone. Each evening they ‘make camp’, constructing new individual nests either on the ground or in trees. A suckling baby gorilla nests with its mother, but as soon as it is weaned at about three years old, she teaches it to make its own nest and it sleeps there. Many animals sleep together even as adults, but the highly socialized gorillas (and other primates too) sleep by themselves.
    Meanwhile orangutans, which are as nearly related to humans as gorillas, are far more solitary in their lifestyle. This species spends most of its daily life alone, although its young are more gregarious.
    And not all lions or wolves live in packs: both species have a second form of organizational behaviour – individuals who live alone: the lone wolf and the nomad lion. Both lions and wolves may maintain this status for life, or move in and out of it, setting up new prides or packs. These less-socialized individuals are not rare and are not created by external or unusual traumas – they are, apparently, perfectly ‘natural’.
    Culturally we like the idea of the close-knit social group, so we tend to ignore how much hunter-gatherer activity is best done alone. The socially organized big-game hunt is surprisingly inefficient: kill rates vary from as low as 17 per cent up to about 40 per cent, which is not going to keep a community in food. Fishing, small-animal hunting and a great deal of vegetable gathering are frequently done alone. The more northerly, tundra-and taiga-based hunter-gatherer societies are more dependent on meat, since there is less edible vegetation: their huge and famously complex reindeer hunts are highly socialized and collaborative – different small groups coming together to build elaborate traps and fences and runs to exploit the reindeer-herd migrations. But these spectacular events are seasonal (like the Common Shearing I discussed earlier) and can as easily be seen as ‘leisure’; most gathering and hunting and fishing is done more quietly alone.
    The more, and the more sensitively, we look at what actually happens out there, beyond the boundaries of modernity – at the complexity of models and forms of social being – the more we will be sceptical about anything being purely ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. We will most certainly become increasingly aware that solitude, in greater or smaller quantities, is simply a normal part of how it is to be.

    Gorillas sleep alone.

5. Learn Something by Heart
    This suggestion may come as something of a surprise. What does the tedious, old-fashioned task of rote learning have to do with strengthening your capacity for and enjoyment of being alone? Didn’t we break away from that dead educational model decades ago? Now we have the Internet, and calculators and mobile phones, why on earth would we want to clog up our brains with those repetitive factoids – like times tables, irregular verbs and the dates of the kings of England?
    There are a whole series of counterarguments and answers to these sorts of questions, beginning with the observation that there are other richer things to learn by heart – and note all the connotations of ‘heart’ here; they include love and rhythm. If you find times tables or historical dates boring, learn something else – poetry, a foreign language, the periodic table. But there are two particular answers which relate very closely to the joys of solitude and the fear of being alone: a well-stocked mind enhances creativity, and 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.
    I have already suggested that solitude may be a necessity, and it