Read How to Be Alone (School of Life) for Free Online Page B

itself may well prove isolating: one of the problems with projected fears is that they do tend to make the scary thing or event more likely, rather than less likely, to occur.
    The problems with the second option are more complex. In the first place, online social life necessarily entails disembodied relationships. Yet we are a culture that places an extremely high value on sexual and other physical relationships. We understand the limits of language and have an awareness of how much information is carried by non-linguistic communication – by body language, expression and ‘tone’. Relationships without these elements are necessarily partial.
    Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, argues that there is a neurological limit to the number of people that most human brains have a capacity to perceive as fully developed, complex individuals. Dunbar fixes the number at 150. Michael Hibbert, who claims to have the most Facebook friends in the world, has 8,924. This must, at the very least, change the meaning of the word ‘friend’.
    In fairness, I should point out that not everyone agrees with me here. There are other reasons for using social media than to generate a plethora of ‘thin’ relationships.
    My friend Anne Wareham the garden writer – someone who definitely knows how to be alone and often is – believes that the New Media creates real communities of choice:
When we first came to live in the countryside we knew no one. We spent some lonely years building up friendships and those rarely with really like-minded people. And old friends were more difficult to see.
That really was solitude and I remember my frantic efforts to get online when I first heard of the Internet and when it wouldn’t have offered much anyway – no one there.
But they are there now, and social media introduces you to people around the whole wide world. With Twitter I have met people who share my particular preoccupation with being serious about serious gardens and they are rare – but if you have the world to search you can find like-minded people and they find you. This has also enabled a lively dialogue on the website I edit, www.thinkingardens.co.uk.
For someone like me, who values solitude, it’s ideal. I can manage my time and manage my contact with the world, and give real time and effort where and when I choose.
Now I am conscious that my mother-in-law might perhaps need institutional care one day. She is computer literate and therefore of a generation which may no longer find themselves in the isolation of an institution full of people with nothing in common but age – because they will have the freedom of the web.
It’s all an enormous luxury and freedom.
    Nonetheless I believe our fear of solitude is real and is in many ways disabling. I do not believe that running away from this reality is effective, protective or even socially beneficial.
    So what follows are ideas for overturning negative views of solitude and developing a positive sense of aloneness and a true capacity to enjoy it. It is not progressive – you do not have to do the various exercises in the order I am offering them, but I do suggest that you start with number 1. I recommend starting with the exercises that feel as though they make the most obvious sense to you, and which do not seem too stressful.
    Although, as I have said, this programme is not progressive, it is cumulative. Like all learning experiences, you need a combination of theory and practice, so I have tried in the pages that follow to alternate ideas that might strengthen your desire for and reduce your fear of solitude with ways in which you might, in practice, develop your taste for and skill at it.

1. Face the Fear
    On the very first page of this book I observed that in a practical sense it is not actually very difficult to be alone. Almost everyone is alone some of the time. So any suggestions for developing a happier relationship with solitude are going to