Mark Twain once said "Be good, and you will be lonely." Loneliness, though a double-edged sword, here is an all-good stuff. As far as my experience is concerned, Loneliness, to some extend, really helps people make progress.

Loneliness can be catalyst for success. Six years back in time, the time when China had a huge gap bewteen the cities and countrysides, thanks to the increased university enrollment, many boys and girls from poor families in countrysides, gained their access to university education in big cities, with little knowledge of the city life，and the outside world. They could not, by any means, fit into the college life which is more a modern one than the aboriginal one in the countryside. This directly led to the lonely life for these poor young boys and girls from countryside. Simon, one of my collegemates, is one of these boys. In the first year of college, he surprised most of us time and time again in the class by telling us his stories of study in the Mandarin we could not understand, let alone English; and he also had little knowledge of what a computer is. Of course, when stopped by "language barrier", we could not be good friends to him, and he also can not by any how fit into our life. Things like this happened the whole year. One day the next year, when we were sophomore, it was him, the same guy we had a bad first impression, surprised all of us by stardard Mandarin, and fluent English. From then on, Simon who still did not have fancy clothes, fashionable hairstyle, and handsome face, became an all-star student for our college. Success made him open and more sociative, but still focusing on his subjects. Later, when communicating with him, I fould throughout the year, he has been working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week on his subjects, especially on his English, while for us boys who at the beginning knew something about how to communicate in English, something about computer, have all been lagged far behind. I asked myself why. It’s obvious that it’s the loneliness that kept him making progress daily. Sometimes, being surrounded with people is not always good; we could get lost in the social life. In this regard, loneliness is just a sort of catalyst.

I am not pursuading people to choose a lonely life; on the contrary, I am hoping, for those who have been in loneliness for a long time, to walk out of it. Nowadays, many people are lonely, not because they don’t have friends to talk and share with, but they are building walls instead of bridges. Like Simon I depicted in my previous paragragh, he was not building walls; though there did existed a wall of communication barrier, but bridges. We can when suffered from loneliness use it as a propeller for forging ahead. Once getting out of it, don’t linger on the happiness of successfully fitting into a new way of life, be proative and value-oriented, be self-motivated, self-reliant and self-confident. I am sure when you reach the day when you are unable to be pessimistic, you won’t fail to find out you are already in a position of success.

Therefore, my understanding of Mark Twain is availing yourself of the benefit of loneliness, and making a difference to yourself and the world as well.