A friend forwarded this youtube link to me today:
How to be Alone
It's a 4 minute film/poem (by fiilmmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis) that made me think of this thread. I highly recommend it.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there're always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might've never happened had you not been there by yourself
Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.