Being Alone

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, speaks for anyone who has known loneliness at its worst. Most of us have been there, if only briefly, and a growing number now report living there much of the time. The paradox is hard to miss. We have never had more ways of reaching one another, yet the ranks of the lonely keep growing.

Being Alone begins by separating two experiences that are often treated as one. Loneliness looks outward and fixes on what is missing. Solitude turns inward and finds something worth having. Paul Tillich called the first the pain of being alone and the second its glory, and the distance between them, David Tuffley argues, lies less in your circumstances than in how you think about them.

This is not a book that tells you to get out more, join a club and meet new people. That ground is well covered elsewhere. Its claim is more interesting: loneliness is a signal, much like hunger, telling you that you have become disconnected from something larger than yourself. Friends and family are one source of that connection. Purpose is another, and it remains available when company is not. Find a cause you consider more important than yourself, give it some of your time and energy, and belonging tends to follow.

Tuffley reads the problem through evolutionary psychology. We carry the instincts of ancestors for whom exclusion from the group could be fatal, which explains why isolation hurts and why cooperating on worthwhile work feels so nourishing. From there the book ranges widely. It looks at what a community is and how to join one without surrendering your identity to groupthink. It takes religion apart using Ninian Smart's seven dimensions, asking what human needs ritual, myth, doctrine and sacred architecture have always met, and how a sceptic might meet them by secular means. It attends to the body too, since a sedentary, poorly fed, over-stressed person is badly placed to enjoy their own company. Chapters on exercise, nutrition, stress, laughter and gratitude show how each alters the mood in which time alone is spent.

The longest chapter turns to the mind itself. Drawing on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, Tuffley describes nine ways of being intelligent, from the naturalistic and the bodily to the musical, the linguistic and the existential, and pairs each with a practical exercise. You are invited to walk mindfully, to read the great writers for an hour a day, to learn the language that buildings speak, to listen without judgement to music you would normally switch off, and to meditate using a simple method set out step by step. The aim is a well-furnished inner life, one that makes solitude a pleasure and leaves you better company for others.

The voice throughout is that of a well-read friend. Shaw, Nietzsche, the Oracle at Delphi and the long-lived people of Okinawa all appear, alongside the author's own experience as an ocean swimmer, a traveller, and a man who twice came close to death and learned to treat each day as a gift.

If you are lonely, this book offers a way of treating the cause, not merely the symptoms. If you already love solitude, it will show you rooms in that house you have not yet entered.