I love this clip...I am alone right now and loving it!

Tanya Davis, the poet and woman in this video deserves to make some money off this since it went viral on the internet. If you, the viewer, liked it, please download the podcast version of How to be Alone, at Sandbar Music, for 99cents.

We should all reach out and tell someone how much we care for them. The problem with this world is that most people are too self centered. Let's not worry about us and start telling others that they matter. Giving someone a compliment can make the difference. Let's reach out and touch a needed heart. You'll feel better you did.

I've been alone my whole life. I can be alone in a crowd of thousands. Funny, I never saw it as a plus.

Looks like many more of us could use an "It Gets Better" video. This is a very good one indeed. Thanks for sharing, Roger.

Obviously single and childless.

Thank you for sharing this touching, moving monologue. I am at times a lonely person, though less often now than ever before, as I grow to know and love myself better in my early 30s. But I have also, in my life, been a brave woman who sits at the bar alone, who takes herself out for dinner, who is bemused and wistful at the people and lives circulating around her. I am touched by the depth and the universality of your blog entry on loneliness, the video you've posted here, and the comments of those who have responded to your post.

My favorite lonely time, and the most vivid, was a night spent on the train to San Francisco to visit a friend for spring break in my first year of graduate school. I reclined in my chair in the observation car and listened to Leonard Cohen for the first time ever while looking at the stars and falling in love with the music and with myself. "The Guests" remains one of the most poignant and redolent songs for me, for this reason: it kept me company through that long and exploratory night, and it revealed to me some deep and secret well of love at the depths of my loneliness. It is, in a way, my madelaine.

Reminds me of Drunk Chick from Winnipeg - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlVNCg74ma0

The trick is, that if you dance well enough and stay reasonably sober, you will be dated eventually.

Awww...

Love yourself first, as loving anyone else, before you love yourself, is not a good replacement.

Reminds me a little of the comfort offered in lonesomeness as different from depressive loneliness. It's an American thing - in our poetry, fiction, art, and, of course, country music. We make lemonade out of lemons. See LONESOME: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude (IBTauris/Palgrave, 2009).

"Lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless."

I began practicing being alone early, compared to some people I suppose it came easily to me, and it's been natural for more for so long that I forget, lose sight of how hard it is for some people to be alone with themselves, how frightening, painful, dangerous.... For me, "How to Be Alone" has become about the battle to find time away from others, no matter how much I love them, so that I can hear my own voice, fully be in my own experiences, unmediated by the conversation, interests, actions of people around me. For now, my struggle is to fully be myself in the context of interaction with others.

The first thing I notice about that video, even before I play it, is the cat curled up on the bed. I'm alone right now ... My husband left me very recently after deciding he could no longer live with a long illness that *I* live with ... and my two beloved cats are the loving beings who are helping me to stay in the world as the profound disorganization of grief and mourning take me over.

Solitude is one thing ... Involuntary aloneness is another.

Jaliya, I send my sincere hope and prayer that you've experienced respits from the grief and mourning. I'm so glad you have those loving beings (as I write this from the solitude of my bedroom, curled up with my own feline loving being beside me). Tough time of year. I hope that you're getting through. Strength and peace, H.

A great video...I appreciated it because I have always been ok with being alone, maybe because I was the only girl in my family with four older brothers. I read a lot, daydreamed, pretended. My husband grew up as an almost only child being much older than his two siblings. We respected that we each needed our own space and yet enjoyed being together. Maybe that is why I have cats--they, too, like being alone at times but also like to curl up in my lap for together time. I can travel all over the world alone and enjoy it. I guess the secret is, you have to like yourself first.

Hey! That statue of Churchill is in front of the Library in my home town. Hello, from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

i'm so lonely : (

I like the thought that you do not have to compete with other conversations and goings on when you are "alone". I don't know if it is a coincidence, but I grew up in a large family. One of nine kids.
I enjoy the quietness and doing things alone so that I can truly savor the experience.

Great piece. Makes you think............