Being Alone is Almost as Good as Being Together
Discovering your interiority
Whenever I talk to friends on the phone these days, their greatest wish is to have alone time. Those of us who live, work, attend school, eat all our meals, and socialize only with our nuclear families crave alone time. In my family, it is a rare gift to be in an empty house and each of us relishes the quiet moments when they happen.
The other profound desire my friends share with me is to spend time with people they love (not their immediate families) in person. They want to go out to dinner with friends, to sit with them in a cafe warming up after a long walk, and sip cardamom rose lattes together. They want to carpool to the mountains for a hike and talk on the way with the windows closed and masks off.
We want to be alone and we want to be together. We need both things. The other evening I picked up my daughter from her high school soccer practice. She’d missed dinner so when she got home I waited for her to finish showering and planned to sit with her while she ate. I called down to her that dinner was on the table but she didn’t come. Eventually, I went down to her room to see what was up. “I was waiting for you to go to bed,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied, genuinely surprised, “I thought you’d be lonely eating all by yourself.” We…
