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Becoming Your Own Best Friend
When you’re spending time alone, show yourself some compassion
In this day and age, across much of the developed world, we are bombarded by phenomenal amounts of input; here in the UK we’re exposed to around three and a half thousand marketing messages each day, trying to persuade us to want all kinds of things we didn’t know we needed, plus TV, radio, newspapers, books, and conversation. There are words everywhere.
On the ocean it is very different. There was very little input, and almost none of it is verbal. When there aren’t as many words coming in, you find that you start paying a lot more attention to the voices inside your own head — which is a mixed blessing. If you ever have a desire to get to know your inner demons, I can highly recommend spending over a hundred days confined to a rowboat with no stereo, and for the last twenty-four days, no satellite phone.
It might sound a bit weird talking about voices in your head, but we all have them — it’s not a sign of mental illness. So the first thing to do is to acknowledge their existence, to know that it’s normal to sometimes feel conflicted. It often feels as if there are two different viewpoints fighting for domination inside your skull.
But like all of our internal issues, the best way to handle them is to turn around and shine a bright light on them. When…
