How to Be Alone (School of Life) (10 page)

One had to be careful not to be caught in the act of pulling threads out of the towel. These were only changed once a fortnight and so it took me about two months to get the required thirty-two threads from which to plait my cord. Fortunately for myself, I had always been a fanatical lover of knots, and possessed that most remarkable publication,
The Ashley Book of Knots,
which I had studied assiduously and which, in addition to knots, also contained a number of sinnets. I plaited a beautiful sinnet – a round one, the sort known as coach-whipping – out of thirty-two threads in groups of eight.

(Edith Bone,
Seven Years Solitary
(Hamish Hamilton, 1957))

There are so many examples of the empowerment provided by having external material to hand – private, personal and learned along the pulses – that I do wonder if the fear that our heads are empty and that we are without reliable points of connection is one of the causes of our contemporary terror of being alone. It is worth remembering that the joyful desert hermits of the third to fifth centuries were almost entirely illiterate: their daily recitation of the psalms – the recommended and clearly much-loved rhythmical repetition – was done entirely from memory, the rich fruit of ‘rote learning’.

6. Going Solo

Oddly, the form of being alone which attracts the least criticism is the one that is in many ways the most dangerous: the solo adventure. It feels strange to me that people who choose to be alone in the comfort of their own house are regarded, and too often treated, as weirdos, while those who choose to be alone several thousand feet above the snowline or in a tiny boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are perceived as heroes. I am not entirely sure why this is the case; perhaps because so many people do not seem to understand (or to want to understand) what ‘being alone’ is meant to be
for,
whereas being the first person to do something does strike chords for lots of us. Since almost every square inch of the world has now been explored, doing so under especially tricky circumstances becomes the next new thing.

Circumnavigation is a good example of this phenomenon: in 1522, only eighteen of the 200 sailors, in just one of the five ships which had set out in 1519 under Ferdinand Magellan, returned to Spain. (Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines.) This not-entirely-successful expedition was greeted with extraordinary excitement and enthusiasm throughout Europe. When Francis Drake returned from the second full circumnavigation nearly sixty years later he was welcomed ecstatically and knighted on board his ship, the
Golden Hind.
But after this, circumnavigation became almost commonplace, until the very end of the nineteenth century when Joshua Slocum did it single-handed – alone. In 1969 Robin Knox-Johnston completed the circuit single-handed and nonstop. The challenge to do something new led directly to the need to do it alone.

The same history plays itself out in mountaineering – Everest was first climbed in 1952 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay; in 1980 Reinhold Messner was the first person to climb it solo (and without bottled oxygen) and in 1995 Alison Hargreaves was the first woman to make the ascent solo. Both these latter climbers regularly climbed with others – the need to do something not done before pushed them forcibly towards solitary climbing.

The pattern is fairly constant with many other forms of extreme adventure: it is harder to do these sorts of things alone and so it becomes more of a challenge and, for many people, a more heroic endeavour. It also appeals to something almost atavistic in many people who do not themselves want to be alone, and who are often highly critical of people who seek out more tranquil solitude, but nonetheless find solo adventurers deeply romantic and fascinating.

At first sight it appears to be something of a contradiction, but if you want to experiment with being alone it is sometimes easier to do it by making it into an ‘adventure’ than by staying safely at home. One of the most difficult things about being alone, as I have already outlined, is the distaste and open criticism of one’s social circle. If instead of saying ‘I’m going to take my holiday alone this year’ you say ‘I want an adventure; I am going to walk the West Highland Way / cycle to Istanbul / camp on an uninhabited island – solo’ you will get all sorts of interest and support. Some of this may be a bit curious or even bemused; people will ask ‘why?’ But they are far less likely to regard you as sad, mad or bad.

A word of warning: Magellan, Drake, Slocum and Knox-Johnston were all very experienced sailors. Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, Messner and Hargreaves were highly skilled mountaineers. Undertaking extreme adventures without previous experience and knowledge is dangerous – Donald Crowhurst ended up mad and dead in the first Golden Globe race; he had barely sailed single-handed at all when he took his untested yacht out into the Atlantic; Chris McCandless, the ‘hero’ of the book (and film)
Into the Wild,
almost certainly died from being ignorant and under-equipped. What is a bold adventure for one person is an immature folly for another. In personal terms an ‘adventure’ is something challenging that you have not done before but have reasonable grounds for believing you could achieve – if you are brave, determined and lucky enough.

Over the centuries a remarkably wide variety of individuals have spoken warmly of the enhanced sense of self they have found in doing something courageous on their own. Henry Thoreau wrote about this sense of empowerment in
Walden,
when he explained why he had gone to live alone in a wood in Connecticut for two years in 1845–47:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up.

Richard Byrd, the US admiral and explorer, gave a similar explanation in the opening of his book
Alone,
in which he described his adventure alone through seven months in the Antarctic:

I wanted to go for experience’s sake: one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full … to taste … solitude long enough to find out how good [it] really was … I wanted something more than just privacy … I would be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man’s laws but my own.

If this approach to practising being alone appeals, I highly recommend travelling alone. This is mainly because you almost certainly know how to travel. You will only need to add on the ‘alone’ bit to turn it into a solo adventure. Tradition says that the mountaineer George Mallory, who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924 on his third attempt to reach its summit, answered any questions about why he wanted to climb Everest with ‘because it’s there’. Thoreau and Byrd, along with many others, seem to be answering ‘because I am me’. They are doing these things to explore their own inner worlds as much as the external one. Byrd added ‘Walking down 5th Avenue can be just as lonely as wandering in the desert – but I contend that no one can be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits.’

I have certainly found for myself that solo adventures – of a distinctly more modest kind than these – have given me unexpected and rich material to write about, have deepened my sense of myself as a free and autonomous individual and have provided a quality of challenge and reflection different from anything I have ever been able to achieve at home.

You can also, like the solo adventurers I have just mentioned, build up slowly. It is always less alarming (though less adventurous) to begin somewhere that they speak the same language as you do; what about going to the Orkneys – without flying? The great austere stretch of Scotland north of the Highlands is not only stunningly beautiful, it is little visited and very underpopulated; the landscape itself offers an experience of solitude. Or travel by bicycle to every mediaeval cathedral – adding all the resonance of ‘pilgrimage’ to your adventure? Or camp out alone, even if it is only in your back garden?

Alternatively you can go somewhere to do something you already know how to do, and like doing: scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, art galleries in New York, shopping in Paris, the opera in Vienna. Travelling in a country where you know no one and cannot speak the language creates particular demands; certainly you will feel more ‘alone’ when you cannot understand what people around you are saying – no danger of eavesdropping, falling into casual chat or otherwise interrupting one’s solitude. But at the same time discovering one’s ability to rise to such occasions is even more empowering.

The great austere stretch of Scotland north of the Highlands is not only stunningly beautiful, it is little visited and very underpopulated.

The idea is to push your own boundaries in the expectation of having a new kind of fun. The rewards are a double freedom – the freedom of knowing yourself and pleasing yourself beyond your old comfort zone, and a deeper sense of achievement. You have done something most people are too scared to do. Solo travel gives you both these freedoms, while also usually attracting the admiration and even envy of people who would not dare. Certainly there seems to be an inexhaustible appetite to learn more about solo adventures. There is a huge number of lectures, films, autobiographies, novels and photographs by or about people who have had such experiences. They tend to confirm that individuals flourish creatively and psychologically if they do something that feels courageous to them (and particularly if they have to overcome actual frightening moments) and exciting to others. One thing about ‘pushing boundaries’ is that they expand as you do so. Beyond these ‘beginner’ solitudes, the whole world is waiting for you. You may end up feeling, as Thoreau came to feel, that you ‘never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.’

As a society we have a deep belief that travel ‘broadens the mind’. If there is any substance in the claim that things you do on your own are experienced more intensely than those that you share with someone else, it seems highly likely that solo journeys will broaden the mind more than package holidays, or even independent travel with a companion.

Most of us have a dream of doing something in particular which we have never been able to find anyone to do with us. And the answer is simple, really: do it with yourself.

7. Train the Children

There is a strong – and I think well-founded – sense that solitude is a learned skill. We know that sociability is culturally acquired: think of all the hours we put into teaching children to ‘share’, not to bite each other, to be grateful, to moderate and manage anger and, as they get older, to dress appropriately, not to steal or lie and to consider other people’s feelings. No one expects this to come ‘naturally’ to children, even though we also believe that human beings are genetically programmed for group interaction, are inherently social and
need,
for true flourishing, both to achieve intimate one-to-one relationships and to ‘win friends and influence people’. But far from putting similar efforts into encouraging children to develop a healthy capacity to be alone, or to explore what being alone means to them, and to enjoy solitude, we go to extraordinary lengths to ‘protect’ them from any such practice and experience. I believe that this disables them, or at the very least does not equip them for life events which at some time or another they are extremely likely to encounter.

If you are scared of being alone yourself it can be challenging to allow your children to experience aloneness. We know that being alone is extremely important to some people – and may happen to anyone. We know that solitude is almost a necessity for creativity and the development of a genuinely and richly autonomous sense of identity. We seek out a wide range of experiences for our children – and want their schools to provide these too. We want young people to develop useful internal risk-assessment abilities, resilience and the capacity to remain strong and well in future difficult situations. We want them to have rich imaginations, physical competence, freedom and as much joy as possible. All these things are enhanced by solitude and by the ability to enjoy being alone sometimes.

There are some strategies for developing these skills in the young. Unfortunately, many child psychologists, and particularly the authors of popular childrearing ‘textbooks’, have taken the view that a child’s psyche is immensely fragile and must be cherished almost obsessively; that any fear is damaging and that children must be protected at all costs from any moment of alarm, even if this means losing out on positive and enriching experiences on the other side of that moment of fear. I feel that we, as a society, have allowed our own fear of solitude to affect our judgement and encourage us to advocate ever greater levels of intervention, overprotection, stimulation and social interaction. Some childcare experts, however, have courageously stood out against the tide of fashion: Anthony Storr and more recently Richard Louv, author of
Last Child in the Woods
(2005), are examples worth exploring. However, the following list of ways to give our children safe experience of and practice in solitude, though drawn from their and others’ writing, are my own: