The Value of Being Alone

"No man is an island."

Cliché, yet it's the closest depiction of our society today.

We human beings are scared to be alone. We are scared of people leaving us or singling us out from the crowd. In today's society, the number one fear is actually not death.. but rejection. 

That's why people are always looking for ways not to be alone, be it in the company of people, a pile of books, a stack of DVDs or even just a playlist in their phones.

We don't want to be alone because we know how it feels like to be alone; and because we already know how it feels, we don't want to experience it again. 

On the contrary, according to Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her article "Moon Shell", we must be alone. There's an innate desire for solitude in every person - no one can escape this reality no matter how one tries to surround himself/herself with human company or with things or tasks to be just "busy".

We are fooling ourselves if we think that we can run away from the solitude we don't want to experience. Being alone says Lindbergh, is necessary. 

Despite the deafening silence we don't want to hear, and the aching void in our hearts that we don't want to feel, there is actually a value in solitude.

What do we actually get by being alone?

1. Truth

    They say that truth has many faces. It manifests different masks in various situations. By being alone, we can search for the 'truth' that manifests from our core.

    Our personality is just one instance. We show different sides of ourselves to different groups of people such as being jolly and talkative when with friends, but very serious when with family. 

    By being alone, we can actually find our 'self'. The one who need not display so many masks. It's in solitude that we find our lost self who drifted away and was broken to many pieces. It's in silence and distance from the crowd that we begin to understand the interplay of our self. And when we find out about this truth, we cannot be a stranger to ourselves anymore. We get to know who we are; and others will also begin to understand us more.

2. A different angle

   It is also in solitude that we begin to notice things that we failed to notice before; it might be signs in the road or a flock of birds passing by. When we isolate ourselves from the demands of society, our visions expand from merely seeing what 'one wants to see' to what 'one needs to see'. We are freed, in some way, from the enclosed dreams that we made. By being alone, we can look at the world in a different angle, and this angle would make one closer to the world.

3. Connect-the-dots

    Solitude allows us to think. It's the starting point of our reflection. We are brought back to the various happy and exciting moments, or even the sad ones that we have forgotten or tried to forget. This allows us to pick different experiences from our memories and join them together to create a unified album of ourselves which might answer our "whys" and "hows". This interlink helps explain the questions that baffled our minds for days, or even a longer period of time.

Being alone does not mean that we do not fit in the group or we don't have social skills, as opposed to what society labels us nowadays; neither does physical separation from the rest entails our solitude.

Being alone is a way of replenishing one's self because we have been giving too much to society by abiding to their dictates. We need to be alone to pause and make way for ourselves' desires.

Being alone is not actually scary. Being left behind does not always mean that we are unwanted and rejected.

Think of the values that we can achieve by being alone. It's actually worth the experience.