"Alone" Time

 One of the problems of being in the city (or excitement, perhaps) is that there are so many things that seem to "need attention". I have noticed that there needs to be more quiet time just to know one's own thoughts and state of mind. Unfortunately, a busy schedule and lifestyle often leaves a person so exhausted that at the end of the day, they are only in the mood to distract themselves through Youtube videos or the like. This kind of cycle leads to endless distractions.
   It's one thing to be alone but there is also a sense of recovery,  or coming back to the sense of a person's most heartfelt experience of aliveness. I have found that this is most difficult to recover. During the group meditation practice tonight, it took quite a while for thoughts to settle to the point where I wasn't driven by them, and luckily the facilitator for tonight's session allowed me the opportunity to relax myself. When all the thoughts settled, I did feel myself a completely different person, as though the thoughts were just random furniture in a bare and already clean, spacious room.  Thus, you can imagine how hard it is to really recover an authentic sense of being in daily life, if it takes nearly two hours for the mind to settle and know that it is truly sitting in he present.
   It's not sufficient to just "be alone" to have this time with one's own experiences and felt sense of being. One has to get to a certain point where they can recover the lost sense of "who I am is not affected by all of this". This is a kind of felt appreciation of existence that I have often experienced as a young person, but very rarely as an adult. Could it be that one's responsibilities take them too much away from the sense of wonder in being alive?