The Company of Yourself · 17 Practices & 6 Meditations

Ten things, done alone, in order, from the easy one to the one you are dreading. Rung one is an hour at home with the phone in another room. Rung nine is dinner in a restaurant, on your own, staying for pudding. You have just felt something about rung nine, and that feeling is the reason this exists. In between: coffee alone, a walk with no destination, a gallery where you read the labels last, a film you chose entirely for yourself, a whole evening with one book, lunch on a weekday, an afternoon in a city with no itinerary. And at the top, one night away, somewhere unremarkable, for no reason you could justify to anybody. The phone stays in the bag on every rung, because a phone is company. Functionally, not metaphorically. Which means you have not been alone in years. You have been unaccompanied. Two things are worth knowing before you start. People dramatically overestimate how much others notice them, and people consistently expect to enjoy solo outings far less than they actually do. The dread is real and it lives almost entirely in the doorway. The question underneath all ten is not about confidence. It is: what do I naturally become interested in when nobody else is influencing the choice? A great deal of what you call your taste was assembled in company, in a thousand small accommodations that each made sense at the time. Seventeen steps. It says plainly, on the second page, that solitude and avoidance wear the same clothes, and what to do if the honest answer is the second one.