Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
-Elizabeth Bishop
I will soon embark on a vacation the likes of which I have never had before.
While it is almost a full four years since I last had a vacation day, let alone week, I have boldly booked myself into a house, for one full week, alone.
Such aloneness is not something I have ever experienced before – it’s an experiment that I hope will unleash creativity although it may possibly result in madness.
I am not used to being alone. In my house there are kids, pets—outside there are neighbours and a village I have known and that has known me all my life.
I have travelled alone a great deal, before I had children, but never lived in such seclusion as this promises to be. Here I shall find no breakfast companions silently sitting at adjacent tables as you might in a guest house or hotel. It’ll just be me.
There’ll be no one there when I take a break from my purposeful struggle at the keyboard. No one to say good night to as I shake off the day's work before I go to sleep.
I’m sure to be lonely at first, I’ll miss my children, I always do—even as they walk out the door heading for school – I miss them.
It may take a day or two of adjustment, settling into what will be a kind of monastic lifestyle except for the provision of kitchen appliances, spare rooms and beds.
This will be an adventure, one where nothing much happens, yet keeps you tight with anticipation about what will happen next. How will it end?
It is my proposed goal to excommunicate the world while I see what alchemy solitude presents. No news, no social media, no email. What precipitates from an unusual mixture of concentrated time and empty space?
My career is sodden with the weight and necessity of the tools of modernity, my mind overheated with the endless input of data.
I am afraid of silence- in silence there is nothing to hear but yourself. What will I say, will it be worth saying?
Despite my plan to plumb the depths of my mental and creative capacity—some allowances must be made. I plan to take walks, read books—finish War and Peace for the third time, hit the reset button on my attention span which has been greatly diminished by the pitter patter of too many monsoon seasons of information.
There never seems to be enough time to think. I try to carve out one hour of the day – no radio, no email, no social media—just me and a hundred more like me, tapped into a collective silent space on our computers where we do our best to think and write big or small things in the London Writers Salon.
Sometimes this is difficult; there are distractions—many of them internal. Knowing this foretells the difficulty I may encounter during my vacation. I will need discipline of purpose to fend off the urge to engage with social media, to starve myself of the affirmation of views and likes for whatever it is I create that day. To keep writing beyond my inner critic, beyond the certainty that it’s all a useless pursuit.
A week of reflection may be a lot to endure. This will be the strangest vacation I’m likely to ever have. I am both anxious and excited to see what will transpire behind that door and in my head.
And I do hope that I can rest—that is something I am not good at. I have a hard time stopping. That may prove to be the biggest challenge on my vacation itinerary. I’ll soon find out. My vacation is only two weeks- and two hours drive away.
