the Loner

"We are the ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to contemplate and how to create.

Loners, by virtue of being loners, in celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave—like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels, and sole survivors.

Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before, and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the cabalists.

Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarified. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline.

A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions."

Anneli Rufus, "Party of One, The Loners Manifesto"