Summary of the Book: The Art of Being Alone

Turn your SOLITUDE (state of being alone) into your GROWTH

Recently I completed reading a book called "The Art of Being Alone" by "Renuka Gavrani", suggested by one of my friends. The book is about how we can turn our loneliness into solitude and solitude into your growth.

Loneliness into Solitude

Lesson 1: Stop Romanticising Loneliness:

We all grew up seeing the movies where our hero/heroine struggles and suddenly heroine/hero comes, life becomes all happier at once. But here the book tells us to stop romanticising our life because somewhere we give ourselves false hope that one day someone will come into our life as a hero to save us, just as we see in the movies.

And when no one came, we starts feeling lonely and sense that something is missing in our life, where everyone seems enjoying with their friends. But here author insisted on not to believe what society wrote for us.

So make peace with your solitude, being alone is not necessarily meant that your lonely, which are two different words with two different meanings.

Lesson 2: Hiding our True Self

The most painful and scariest thing in the world is to look into the mirror and not recognise the person staring right at you.

We all are started living the life defined by the tech giants i.e we start saying things that are popular, that are trendy, doing the things that everyone wanted to do. But step by step, we all are becoming like everyone else and forgetting who we truly are.

What author tried to say is "In race of achieving people's acceptance and love, you end up losing yourself". So step up, make yourself different from others and enjoy the little moment which gives joy to YOU.

Lesson 3: How to Be You

• Self Love starts with Self Acceptance

  • Know about yourself

  • Accept yourself

• Self love grows with Self Knowledge

We should be graceful enough to except ourselves for being ourselves. One should able to accept their Good things as well as Bad things, then only you have knowledge on who truly you are and who truly you want to be.

Lesson 4: The Love for Solitude

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you are with

You CANNOT except people to stay forever. You are on your own now. Except for you, no one is going to stay by your side forever.

So one should not forget oneself in the noise of the world.

Solitude into your Growth

Once you master your solitude and you can use your alone to build great world of yourself.

Lesson 5: Practise the Art of Being Alone

Our generation normalised that the solitude is stands for loneliness, something to be escaped. But when you sit alone and give your brain the time to Digest, Reflect, Reset. It might do wonders of it own.

And if you never learned 'how to belong to yourself', you will end up feeling lonely every time someone leaves you.

Lesson 6: Turn your loneliness into your Growth & Make a new Best Bud

You are who you are, whether you like it or not, so why not like it?

We can use our alone time to build ourself by doing what make us feel happy and give satisfaction. And become friends with our goals and dream, with success and achievements.

Lesson 7: Build a Dream Life Plan, The Action Plan, Make Your alone time addictive and Become Independent

1. Define your definitions/dreams

2. Build a Action plan to achieve your Dream life which is better this current one.

3. Be Honest with Yourself

4. Become Independent: It's not anyone's job to satisfy your desires or manifest your imagination into reality. So do by yourself.

My Thoughts

To be honest, this book might not change me instantly, but I feel it will have a strong influence on me, if not now, then definitely later.

The past two years have been quite tough for me. I often felt lonely and found it hard to communicate with others to share what I was thinking or simply express myself freely.

I lost connection with a few friends with whom I thought I had a strong rapport. After that, fear slowly took over. Even when I made new connections, I couldn’t truly open up or be myself.

But this book gave me a new perspective on how to look at things differently, how to accept situations, and how I can slowly start changing my lifestyle and mindset.

I may not have figured everything out yet, but I’ve started understanding that being alone doesn’t have to mean being lost.