Time alone

People who spend time with me are always amazed at the extent to which I keep my own company. Exclamations like, “Don’t you get bored?”, “It’s difficult to not speak for hours!”, and my favourite, “I’m afraid of my own thoughts, I have to be occupied because I can’t stand what’s in my head.”, get passed around a lot in these conversations. I have a lot to say about each one of these responses, and some other time I will.

I don’t mind, or fear, being alone. It gives me the room to roam inside my own mind. And sometimes I stumble over gems. The problem with our society today is that we do not spend enough time thinking. I cannot possibly overstate how beneficial introspection is for you. If we spent half the time we spend talking actually thinking about the things we do or talk about, we wouldn’t do half the crap that wastes our lives and the lives of those around us, including much of that talking.

Experiencing your own mind gives you power; it gives you an opportunity to tame your psychological beasts and come face to face with your shadow personalities. It helps you determine what you spend your time thinking about when you aren’t talking, plus it gives you the opportunity to decide if you are happy with that or how you might like to change it. If you don’t know yourself, how can you change yourself? If you don’t muster the courage to look at those emotional wounds that frighten you, how will you beat that insomnia that haunts your nights?

Time alone gives you the further opportunity to interrogate the world around you. A comprehensive active thinking habit allows you to grasp intricate concepts and connect dots across various fields of knowledge. It allows you to solve problems you won’t solve by talking. You can bother yourself with dilemmas like, ‘seeing how disastrously it’s working for America, what would be more practical alternatives to democratic rule?’, and, ‘what limiting beliefs can I change inside myself to be in a position to make a million dollars?’.

Embrace the opportunity to delve into deep, focused thinking. Uncover the gems that sit within the static of your own mind.