I’m getting ready for a week of monastic life. The daily schedule will be a refreshing disruption to my current routine: early-morning wakeup bell, 2 hours of meditation and breakfast in silence. Then work practice, lunch, rest, some more work, dinner, 2 hours of evening meditation, then lights-out and silence for the night. The key attraction for me is the prescribed mix of alone-time and communal activities. I’ll be doing what I’m told, follow the schedule with everyone, access to computers will be restricted.
“The need for solitude is a complex and dangerous thing, but it is a real need,” wrote Thomas Merton who lived half his life as a Cistercian monk. “It is all the more real today when the collectivity tends more and more to swallow up the person in its shapeless and faceless mass.”
Merton wrote this in 1961, long before computers and the Internet began to lull us into believing that blogs, emails, and social media would connect us all. No borders, no loneliness, instant everything. Yet when I see people checking and re-checking their cell phones with such intensity, I wonder whether they miss the marvels all-around them.
A recent survey in Vancouver asked 4,000 people what bothered them the most. One might expect the cost of living, finding satisfying work, drugs, crime, poverty, homelessness, or “not being able to get into the hot new sushi joint.” But no. “The biggest issue … that they felt lonely, isolated, and unconnected to their communities.”
Ring any bells?
Merton, T. (1961). New seeds of contemplation. New York: New Directions, p. 53.
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