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Many people avoid solitude, fearing it as aloneness.

Solitude can bring some people closer to troubling thoughts than they want to be.

With thoughtfulness or a therapist's help, we can cultivate and enjoy solitude.

“Solitude,” wrote C.G. Jung, “is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.” For me, too. Now. But it wasn’t always so. For a lot of us, solitude can have a chilling resemblance to aloneness. Memoirist Anne Lamott speaks for still others who fear solitude when she says, “My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”

Until my late 20s, solitude was something I tolerated. Barely. I braced for it. Filled it with soothing treats like chocolate chip cookies or colorful magazines or symphonic music that helped me bear the inexplicable dread I felt there, the terrible isolation. I hadn’t yet developed close friendships that might have made me feel a part of the social flow. And in that panicky state of dread that I never would be a part of it, I didn’t have the patience or faith to try to create social connections. Where my peers just assumed they’d meet their true loves and soul mates, I thought it seemed quite improbable. Although my therapist assured me that connecting was human nature and eventually that would seem true to me, it wasn’t until then that I began to recognize the pleasures of solitude.

There’s a reason for this. The esteemed British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott explained that “the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox;........

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