Five days of silence

I spent five days in silence last November. The silence was not a formal retreat. I did not go anywhere. I did not have a teacher. I made the decision two weeks in advance, told my partner and a handful of people who needed to know, took the days off work, and turned off the phone on a Sunday evening. The phone stayed off until Friday morning.

I cannot fully recommend this. A self-guided silent retreat is not the same thing as a properly held one. It is also not nothing. The five days were among the slowest five days of my adult life, and the slowness left a residue that lasted into December.

What I did during the days

Less than I had planned. I had brought several books to the retreat. I read maybe forty pages total in the five days. I had planned to meditate four times a day. I meditated twice. I had planned to journal in the evenings. I did not journal at all. The plans I had made were the plans of a busy person trying to organise the silence. The silence dissolved the plans within about a day.

What I actually did: walked, slowly, in the small park near the flat. Sat in the meditation room. Sat by the window with the second cup of tea of the day. Made simple meals. Washed dishes. Looked at the courtyard. Slept, more than I usually do.

What was hardest

Day three. The first two days I had been operating on the residual energy of the working week. By day three the energy was gone, and the silence was no longer novel, and the mind started to do something I had not been prepared for, which was that it began to surface all of the small unfinished conversations and unresolved feelings I had been carrying for months without noticing.

There was no one to talk to about any of this. There was no teacher to bring it to. There was only the silence, and the surfaced material, and a few hours during which I considered ending the retreat and turning the phone back on. I did not. By the evening of day three the wave had passed. Day four was a quieter day.

What lasted

A small adjusted relationship to the ordinary noise of life. The phone, when I turned it on Friday morning, was louder than I had remembered. The conversations I had over the weekend were faster than I had remembered. The small irritations of a normal week landed with a slightly different weight — they were obviously, after five days, the small fluctuations on the surface of a much larger quiet that the retreat had let me touch briefly.

I would not do this every year. I might do it once more in my life. The five days were enough to know what the silence has to teach a person who is willing to be uncomfortable for a few days.