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Being Alone and being THANKFUL for it.


"Because it’s often in moments of solitude where you realize just how not alone you are. In fact, when you take a moment to be intentionally alone, to absorb everything through the sole filter of your perception, you understand that life is filled with people and things who accompany you. There is a confidence that comes from being alone, a happiness in the more simple pleasures that often go unnoticed when we are distracted by the presence and opinions of others. The crusty bread crackles in your ear when you tear a piece off. The steam from the coffee hits the tip of your nose as you put it to your lips. The small conversations that happen with the man you buy your produce from, or the girl let ahead of you on the subway, all become a kind of warm blanket of confirmation and life. The chatter around you can fill you up with varying degrees of comprehension, tuning in and out when it suits you. You are miles away from alone.
And it is perhaps this that it is most beautiful, most necessary about aloneness. It is realizing that what you’ve always feared, what you’ve always heard such horror stories about, isn’t being alone. It’s not “dying alone,” as if that were even a concrete concept. It’s all of the things that can lead to aloneness, it is the heartbreak whose pain we want to pawn off on the moments we’re sitting by ourselves in front of our stereo listening to the same song over and over again. The pain in loneliness comes from all that surrounds it, not the act itself. And when you spend enough quality time alone, you realize that it is indeed nothing to fear. You realize that you, by yourself, are happy and are confirmed in life and worth by everything around you. And though it will not take the edge off of the painful few moments that lead to us being alone, it is worth reminding ourselves that just because we’re eating alone at a restaurant doesn’t mean we aren’t in wonderful company." - Thought Catalog.