I have long held a less than subtle suspicion about retreats of all kinds, and those who participate in them. Due mostly to the fact that most of said people embark on said retreat(s) in an openly vain attempt to become more mentally, physically, or most dubiously of all, spiritually; well adjusted. The majority of my suspicion is based in the experience that these same people tend to be among the least well-adjusted people I’ve come across.
The rest of it is based in a petty jealousy and resentment on my part for not being in a position to partake in such a luxury. Until the autumn of last year.
After what had been the most trying months of my adult life by every reasonable estimation, much of the project of my first decade of adulthood had been completed. I was in possession of a permanent residency in a relatively wealthy and stable nation. I was rid of the soul-shrinking profession that provided me my residency in said nation prior to this. And I was at a point in my artistic pursuits that I could make a living. After a decade of self-induced toil, I, for the first time, had access to the freedom and space in my life that most of the people around me had been born with. Mostly by virtue of the passport they carried.
The western holiday season was soon approaching, and I was formulating what to do with myself. The standard procedure for a Sri Lankan living away from home would be to make the standard migration home from mid-December till early-January, during which the island turns into a hellscape of third-world middle-class revelry. I had avoided this tradition since I left, and had no plans of changing it this year. My standard procedure for this time was to spend it with whichever other orphaned adults were left to tend to an empty city over the period. This time, with the added pleasure of my goddaughter and her family being close by.
Through the trials of the preceding months, however, I had crawled back to the religion of my raising, Buddhism. Like a coward. Hoping that adding some structure to how I lived my life might make all this immigration bullshit a bit easier to deal with. And it did. A great deal, even. There was benefit to be found in reading Buddhist writings that did not come from the overtly conservative, stagnating, and power-clutching incarnation of the religion I grew up with in Sri Lanka. And some of them made mention of the concept of a retreat. So I went looking for one started by the writer I was reading most at the time, Thich Nhat Hahn. But due to matters of immigration, the centre was in France, and the days I could spend outside of the UK were highly limited. So I searched the internet till I found one that did not necessarily reflect the strain of Buddhist thought in which I was most interested, but the one that was close by and within my budget. The series of letters to come in the following weeks will contain an account of the 10 days I spent there.
In hindsight, I should have spent the time with my goddaughter. My favourite thing about trying new things every now and then, is how they often remind me why I don’t try new things very often.
