As a student, like many of us, I liked to read Henry David Thoreau. Many of his ringing one-liners thrilled me and got copied down in my commonplace book, but there was one sentence I hardly registered: “Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.” In my early 20s, my life was all about action, movement, exploration: Contemplation was for the aged in their rocking chairs.
Within a few years, though, real life began to catch up with me: I’d completed my first four years in an office; I’d fallen in love with the woman I was going to marry; I’d been lucky enough to see much of the globe, from Cuba to Tibet. More dramatically, my house had burned to the ground in a wildfire, and I’d lost not only all my possessions, but also the handwritten notes that were the basis for my next three books. My future, in short, as much as my past.
After weeks of sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, I made my way up (at another friend’s suggestion) to a Benedictine hermitage, four hours north along the California coast, just south of the hamlet of Lucia. I would try to forget that 15 years of Anglican schooling as a boy in England had left me most interested in traditions from the far side of the world. What I found at the top of the mountain, the minute I stepped out of my car, was a radiant view over the blue Pacific, freedom from all distraction (no TV, no cellphones, no internet) and a day that seemed to last for months. I could read, take walks, scribble off letters or, best of all, do nothing at all. The roar of the highway was far below, and for most of the day, even amid birdsong and tolling bells, the main sound was of living silence.
I’d stumbled, in short, into the realm of contemplation. I’ve never meditated, and as a writer on place, I was often in motion, crisscrossing the globe every week. But now I was invited just to sit and watch — not as I did when writing, but with no end in sight at all. And not to think, since my thoughts subsided as soon as I left clamor behind; just to attend. To observe the world, perhaps, as if it were the central scripture.
The results were quite startling. I was no longer angry with that friend I’d been raging against when I drove up; he, too, was probably just trying to find some peace in an overstressed life. Memories rose up — sometimes poignant, sometimes erotic and piercing — and they held and possessed me as they never could when I was driving along the freeway, preoccupied with my next appointment. Death itself didn’t seem quite so terrifying in a landscape of rock and redwood and unbroken ocean — and in a silence that seemed no less changeless. It was instant joy, in short, the kind that lingers even when things are difficult.
I was being asked to offer just $30 a night, which covered hot lunches, hot showers, books and fruit and salad and bread, and the most heart-expanding views along the famously beautiful coastline I’d ever discovered.
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that very soon I reserved a trailer on the hillside for two weeks, and then three. The monks were great company and bracingly undogmatic; they were confident each of us would find what we needed here, whatever names we chose to give to it. I could drive down to a pay phone at the motel along the highway if an emergency arose — but emergencies are never so common as we imagine. Of course it was not easy to leave my mother or my wife-to-be behind, but it felt worthwhile if I could bring back to them someone who was fresh and attentive and brimming with delight, and not the distracted and overburdened soul they otherwise saw, grumbling, “Not right now!”
At the same time, I could never ignore that sentence in Thoreau, whom I was reading much more carefully now in silence: How to make my life worthy of what I saw and who I was — and wasn’t — in this space of contemplation? I wasn’t a monk and never would be. My mother was calling for company after her husband’s sudden death; my loved ones in Japan needed emotional as well as financial support; I had to pay the bills.
Maybe I could try to remake my life a little in the light of what I’d seen in silence? I surprised both my sweetheart and myself by moving to Japan and a tiny, two-room apartment, crowded with her, her 12-year-old son and her 10-year-old daughter; I’d realized, as Thoreau reminded me, that “a man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to leave alone.” In this cramped space, I’d have the luxury of living without a car or a big house, free of constant distractions. I began to pick up some of the wise writers in the Western tradition — Meister Eckhart, Etty Hillesum — no longer convinced that Sufis or Buddhists owned a monopoly on wisdom. And I resolved to try to go on retreat for three days every season, simply to clear my head, root myself in what mattered and remember what I loved.
Plus, of course, to get perspective on the world and my life in it, none of which I could see in the midst of all the tumult. Some friends take runs every day, or swims, for the same reason; some cook or sew or golf. Almost any practice that allows you to open space in your day and your head seems invaluable, especially as the world accelerates, but it was a particular luxury to spend three days and nights with nothing I had to do. Even on holiday, I’m usually captive to my plans.
As the years went on — there have been almost 34 of them now, and more than 100 retreats — the nature of my days in silence began to mature. Not only did silence bring those I cared about close to me — and clearer — than they might be when in the same room; it also turned the strangers along the monastery road into trusted friends. We were all here for a common purpose, and it wasn’t usually a text or a teacher or even a doctrine; it was simply a human longing (or intimation). I grew ever closer to the monks, a wildly talented and friendly collection of scholars, musicians, artists and chemists; I realized I had a connection with everyone met in silence — even if I knew next to nothing of their jobs or their backgrounds — that I seldom had with people met along a busy sidewalk.
I came to understand what Thoreau knew, like all contemplatives: The point of being alone is to be able to give more to others and to be a more useful member of society. “I am naturally no hermit,” he had written in “Walden”; “I think that I love society as much as most.” I didn’t tell anyone to go to my particular retreat, but I did sometimes remind friends that three days away from distraction could clarify their lives. Those who had spent time in silence weren’t surprised when I explained that it was being alone in the ringing quiet that moved me, at long last, and at the not-so-tender age of 42, to get married.
I never regret my life in the world, chronicling its movements and the explosion of possibilities our grandparents could not have imagined. But I hope never to stop returning to my friends in the Hermitage; at times I’ve even stayed with the monks in their Enclosure, there seeing that their lives are all hard work and constant activity to ensure that their guests can enjoy absolute peace. I can’t imagine a more important investment.
One day I was making my little trailer clean, polishing its every surface and wiping the sink down till it shone — as I seldom do at home — when I noticed something that stayed with me (no detail seems trivial in silence). I had to squeeze only a single drop of dishwashing liquid into my glass of water and the whole thing turned blue. It doesn’t take much to transform a life.
Pico Iyer is the author of “The Art of Stillness” and the forthcoming “Aflame: Learning From Silence.”
