The video shows the corner of a brown roof with gold detail painted at the edge. It is foggy and there are pine trees behind the small house. Birds are singing their dawn songs.
I was in the check-out line at the co-op grocery, and the woman doing check-out asked how I was doing. I shared my joy and pleasure about going on a solo retreat for the weekend.
She wished for me great relaxation as well as wished for an opportunity like that for herself.
I felt no jealousy from her, rather a sense of compassionate knowing that I was receiving what was needed for me, and she hoped for the same at some point. The woman bagging my groceries nodded and seemed to smile (behind her mask), wishing me well, too.
We had a simple moment of shared recognition that we each and all needed the opportunity to back away, retreat, cocoon, and relax. I had never met either of these women before, I don’t know what their lives bring them on a daily basis.
What I do know is that they need opportunities just like the one I had over this past weekend.
And not just opportunities to fully retreat but also, as Jenny Odell shares in How To Do Nothing, to “stand apart:”
We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of those movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call ‘standing apart.’
To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day (61).
What I have experienced is that the act of retreating forms a sense of expansion where it didn’t exist before. This sense of expansion and space makes standing apart, once I return, much more attainable.
The retreating and the standing apart, then, support one another.
So, I wonder… how can we more deeply support ourselves in cocooning and retreating? Hiding away in seclusion when we desire or need it? How can we more deeply support ourselves in standing apart while being in it?
And. How can we more deeply support others in having these same opportunities (though they may look very different than our ways)?
The place I was staying was said to have spotty Internet and that reality invited me to question what I even needed to do on the Internet over the weekend. Checking email ended up being the one thing that originally seemed like a need. As I dug deeper, though, it really just was revealed to be an obsessive habit. So I intentionally decided to not check my email for the three days I was away.
This decision to pause a habit further deepened my embodiment of retreat and cocooning.
Cocooning, retreating, standing apart can take many forms, right?
The main thing I’m realizing is both take a ton of permission-giving.
And sometimes the permission slip can be written and handed over simply by one of us taking the action and sharing about it with others along the way.
“I’m doing it and you can do it too, in your own way.”
I hold much privilege in being able to take time away. And. I trust that as more of us retreat and stand apart in our own unique ways, more space will be made for more and more to do so, too.
Til next week,
Cassandra
This was so much easier when I was single and orders of magnitude easier before I had kids. I think there are two main parts, in order: I have to believe that I need and am worthy of retreat; and my partner needs to be a partner. (And there needs to be financial means.) Most women I know do the majority of the work, even if the husbands do a fair amount of housework. Many have written about this already, but "the invisible load"—keeping track of everything that's going on, gone on, needs to go on. It's a lot.
But, even short of a partner who picks up that kind of work, they need to be supportive of time away and take care of things in your absence.