Happy Friday!
Nice to see you again, friends. It’s me, Ephrat Livni, Quartz writer, occasional fighter, and longtime seeker of peace. Welcome to the retreat edition of Quartzy, where we’ll explore our best lives, my worst traits, silent meditation, and how to spend summer vacation.
It’s getting hot here in Florida, where I live, and I’m preparing for the angry season—when the heat gets so overwhelming that retreat (to the beach!) seems the only option. As I walk the dog around the block, I’ll have to talk myself down or risk losing it over something as simple as the sun climbing the sky.
I’ve got a hot temper, which is why I’ve tried to train myself to chill. To that end, I’ve studied Zen Buddhism. It hasn’t made me less intense but has taught me about thought. For one thing, we’ve all got a lot of them. For another, they just don’t stop!
If you’re like many postmodern people, you’re probably feeling irritable and overwhelmed, too. Your devices are notifying you all day long, fostering a sense of urgency—often about nothing at all. We’re burned out (now an officially recognized condition per the World Health Organization) and overstimulated, which is why people are increasingly seeking to retreat into silence.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is just one of a growing number of people who are taking time off to tune out the fervent buzz of a constantly connected world and tune in to themselves. Dorsey this year went to Myanmar, where he spent 10 days gazing inward in silent meditation. While the semi-starved tech billionaire might not be the likeliest of lifestyle gurus, he is on to something.
Shhhh. In a wordy world, taking an occasional break from chatter can be refreshing and illuminating. The writer William Burroughs theorized that language is a virus infecting our minds. So training to live with your brain and its relentless inner discursiveness can be the difference between mental health and madness. But where do you go?
Finding a literal retreat. Alan Ni, a former Google product manager, had that same question. “After quitting my job at Google, I went on multiple silent retreats which changed my life and helped me establish a daily meditation habit,” Ni tells me. “When I was searching for retreats, I realized there wasn’t an easy way to find a meditation retreat—when I saw many people on Reddit had the same issue I decided to make the website myself.”
Meditating Redditors offered to pitch in with design, programming, and product marketing help. With this assistance, Ni created Retreat Base, a site that went live on May 29, offering information about meditation locations in the US. (He plans to expand to include locales worldwide.) Some of these retreats are for practicing total silence for a set amount of time while others may involve an occasional exchange.
Reasons to retreat. “Retreats are out of reach from the daily stressors of work and obligation, void of daily addictions like smartphones and TV, and clean of all other distractions,” Ni’s new site explains. “This provides the perfect environment to deepen your practice and become more introspective.”
In other words, a meditation retreat offers a change of pace with longterm payoffs that traditional vacations do not offer. Spend time with yourself and you may wish you’d escaped to Disney World’s distractions. But you’ll probably also find, after a while, that your mind isn’t an enemy to hide from and that you can deal with your feelings. You can take what you learn into your everyday life, and the intensity of the concentrated experience can help you stay grounded when you’re back at the daily grind.
That said, other adventures can also be educational. Since summer is vacation season, let us contemplate less obviously spiritual journeys that can nonetheless enhance our understanding. In my experience, whenever you travel out of your comfort zone—whether or not you go far from home—you have the opportunity to discover something.
If you’re like me, you’ll find the discoveries aren’t always delightful. Rather, my adventures around the world often showed me that I wasn’t quite as awesome as I would have hoped. When I practiced judo in Japan, for example, I learned that despite my innate feistiness, I’m more of an intellectual dueler than a physical one. (So I ended up fighting in law school and courtrooms rather than dojos.)
Likewise when I hoped to uncover my inner ruggedness deep in the Senegalese bush. Instead, life in a small rural village—and one long, terrifying night lost alone among the mangroves—showed me that while I can be happy in a thatched hut listening to hyenas scream in the darkness, I really like the comforts of city life.
My solo travels have revealed wondrous things too. I grew comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that has made it easier to continually explore new places and new ideas. As long as I’m not facing off with a hyena, I generally feel pretty safe in the world.
Especially if I can see the moon. Perhaps most importantly, if I didn’t spend all that time wandering under a night sky, I might never have become friends with the moon. Now—as I explained in a recent essay in the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar—the moon is my guru, and I see no lunacy in greeting this timeless teacher amiably every evening. Having a daily relationship with nature as I navigate tech culture makes me less desperate to escape.
So, with the weekend (and summer) just ahead, please allow me to recommend the most important networking events you’ll ever attend. Whether you surrender to the moon on regular mindfulness walks, test your mettle on great adventures, or retreat to meet your mind, dedicate this season to getting to know yourself.
Happy hunting!
For the record. If you need inspiration to start ambling in nature, check out Afoot and Lighthearted, a delightful interactive walking journal by University of Belmont English professor Bonnie Smith Whitehouse. This charming, smallish book is fun to look at, pleasing to hold, and chock full of reasons to get out in all seasons. Apart from prompts, mindfulness exercises, quotes from great writers, scientists, and writers, there are blank pages for journaling your thoughts, another practice to cultivate consciousness. This ode to the classic constitutional also offers a handy Latin phrase to change the way you manage problems: Solvitur Ambulando. Loosely translated, it means, “It is solved by walking.” And by “it” Whitehouse means practically anything.