Retreat to Show Up
Hi everyone!
I’m writing this on my fourth day of what I’ve been calling “retreat week”. Retreat Week isn’t really anything official, but rather a cheat code I use to periodically reset my brain. For me, Retreat Week (or sometimes just Retreat Weekend, or Retreat Day) usually entails going somewhere, often camping, where I’m out of my typical environment and have some time in solitude. It’s a time to recharge, to be unstructured, to give copious time and attention to the things I enjoy.
Lucianne, you say, I think you’ve maybe just… reinvented vacation? Good guess, but no!
What sets Retreat Week apart from something like a vacation is that it isn’t technically devoted just to leisure (although leisure can be part of it!). Retreat Week’s defining characteristic isn’t “free time”, per se, but that during this one week, I try to primarily make and honor commitments to myself.
Most of the year, I spend a lot of energy doing things that involve other people, whether that means collaborating with others (as I do as part of my art practice, and in co-running JustSpace), or supporting people in their own efforts (which is now officially my job as a professional coach, but has always been part of my mentorship work in science). I find work in togetherness really fulfilling and joyful– e.g. I just wrapped up the first run of Make It Real!, my workshop that helps people take a languishing project or goal and get it moving, and now I think I’m nearly as invested in my students’ projects as they are! (If you missed the last Make It Real!, sign ups are still open for the next one– feel free to reply here with questions if you have any.)
But fulfilling as that work may be, I am still pretty introverted, and I need time away from others to recharge. On top of that, if I lean too heavily towards my natural tendency to try to accommodate what other people need, I end up feeling depleted, and then that’s no good for anyone. Enter: rolling your own “retreat”.
This year, Retreat Week is a stay-home affair for me. I thought about trying to go somewhere to catch the Perseids, but alas my van needed a serious repair a few weeks back, and I’m not sure I trust it enough right now to risk a long road trip. Frankly, in the past few months I have had to replace both my laptop and my refrigerator, so I figure I’ll perhaps not tempt the gods of expensive repairs any further.
That’s OK, though, because staying home to be “on retreat” is actually the origin story of Retreat Week, which has its roots in advice I gave a good friend nearly a decade ago. After a tumultuous year of upheaval and crisis, my friend was BIG CRISPY BURNT OUT. We talked about her trying to get out of town for her birthday, but she was so mentally and emotionally out of gas she couldn’t even muster the energy to figure out where she’d go. At the same time, she worried that staying home would mean that people would still reach out to her for work commitments, family responsibilities, etc. So one day, while we were talking it over, I had a little lightbulb moment: I told her to tell everyone she was on retreat. Let people interpret that however they wished– tell people the dates you plan to be on retreat, set a vacation responder, and leave it at that. She did it, and everyone assumed she was going somewhere and left her alone. It worked wonders for her, so I started thinking of these little recharge times as “retreats”, too.
Of course, we should all be able to say something similar about vacation, and expect that people will respect the very human need to take time for leisure. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality many people live in, where so often work culture penalizes people for needing to recharge. And, while I am all in favor of working to normalize rest by being transparent about taking vacation time, everyone is also allowed to attend to their own needs without making Normalize Rest!!! the hill they die on that particular day (because ironically, if you don’t attend to your need for rest, you probably won’t have the bandwidth to stick up for anyone’s right to have rest).
On the other hand, to say you are “on retreat” implies a level of sacred unavailability, an unassailable boundary. It’s unspecific, which is part of its power and charm: if you are a person who is permanently overscheduled, Retreat Week (or Weekend, or Day) can be a container where you either don’t schedule things at all, follow a light structure that you feel feeds what you need in that time, or block time that is specifically devoted to something you want to give attention to.
Obviously, being able to take “retreat” time also depends on what your work looks like– I have the freelancers’ blessing/curse where my time is my own, but also the asshole boss I have to negotiate my time with now is… ME. For folks who work hourly jobs (or multiple hourly jobs) where it’s hard or impossible to get time off, maybe retreat time looks like a single day, or even a morning or evening to yourself. In my experience, retreat time– however slight or expansive– is often helped by having a person or people in your life who will help enable you (in the best possible meaning of enable) to help tend to the boundaries of that time, and hold you accountable for the ways you commit to your own needs. Figuring out who that person or people are for you is probably an entire essay unto itself (and another thing we do in Make It Real! workshop) so I’ll leave that thought there for now, but I think it’s worth mentioning because our ability to find time for solitude often (paradoxically) requires the support of our community.
I have no big plans for this Retreat Week, other than to make some room for myself to just be. Staying home has presented many tempting opportunities to accommodate other people’s needs (!) but so far, I’ve been pretty good at resisting (mostly ignoring my email and social media helps a lot). I have a lot of work on my plate coming up, between upcoming workshops and teaching at School of the Art Institute of Chicago this fall, so the anxiety of not being “productive” is nibbling away at me, too. However, I’m trying to stay calm and disciplined about keeping this retreat time, if only so I can show up more fully as myself after it ends.
Wishing you all the time and space to be alone with your thoughts,
Lucianne
