Jack River on the art of being alone

A love letter to the lost art of time alone with oneself....

To write about time is to try to grasp invisible quicksand as it falls all around you and within you. I have never been good at being present in a physical way, since I was a little kid my mind has raced to all other places, its origin was always the here and now, but the destinations felt never-ending and the speed of travel was fast and didn't care for what was missed along the way.

In my album release week, time with myself seems more scarce than ever, and I’m experiencing a kind of magnification of how I suspect we are all living right now. As a dedicated writer since I was young, I have watched my diary become dustier as each year passes into the technological blizzard of the 2000s; the slow dawn complete blackout of our animal senses, the subconscious mass realisation of the quick and instant reality of some of our grander planetary elements of time and space and electricity, the magic of these concepts in the experience of wifi and instant visual worldwide contact in the form of FaceTime and Skype. We are suddenly blinded into an Icelandic 24hr mental day, our inner wires suddenly connected to millions upon millions of people, when 20 years ago, it used to be 20-50 (people per day).

The art of being alone is no stranger to the books of human history, any great thing has likely come from a lone soul with the power to dwell upon a problem for long enough alone to propel her or him into action with others to birth something new. I feel it within, the swimming on the surface whilst there is a 4 dimensional cinema beneath me, playing complex scenes and working through the universe and all its questions without me. I don’t want to miss this. I don’t want to miss out on the experience of being human on earth, for the experience of being connected to other humans on Earth.

Opening up the dialogue between yourself and yourself is something like calling an old friend - it's so dear and important to you but it doesn’t happen for months, and after a while, you begin to feel like it's been too long and its best left to rest. In reality, things usually pick up exactly where they began, and the fear you felt dissolves at the first hello.

So that brings me to Alonenimity. The return to being alone with yourself for alone’s sake, and have no need to connect outwards and let people know what the fuck you’re doing. The ability to be ok with wandering your own heart and your own mind without the need to express any of it to the world. To experience and appreciate your own world and all the insanely wonderful and strange things that are happening beneath the surface of our minds.

My diary sleeps next to me each night and watches me from my desk each day, if I don’t write in it, I send a mental letter to it, I try to confess something small at least - to keep the bridge open. But as of this letter, I promise now to open it, to throw stones into the water of my mind, even if they are small, and see what on earth the ripples look like, alone and anonymous.