You know what's great about silent retreats? You don't have to hear or have an opinion about anything for few days, anything global or local, objective or subjective, immediate or upcoming, related or not, relevant or not.

Five days silent retreat gives you space of not hearing and asking if this talk or liturgy or music or food someone liked, or how much did he like, and, most importantly, why. No chance to give or hear about your experiences or preferences. No chance of shutting someone down with your grandiose story or being shut down with someone else’s. It’s amazing how entrapped we can become by expecting to hear now days what this or that person thinks or said about this or that. But WHO CARES? Who cares if you didn’t like someone’s non verbal communication within first 15 seconds? Who cares if you did not like asparagus for lunch? Who cares if you did not like someone’s not so perfect pitch in that song. Or the whole song list choice. Everyone has to submit to what is or leave. It’s genius. We should do one month silent retreats and then we would not care about so many things which we pretend to care about because it just raises our adrenaline of gives us a status of someone who knows or cares.

When you have a space where no one will tell you if they liked your talk or your music or food, you are just doing your job the best you can and you don’t care about people’s opinions bc they can not tell you or show you what they think or how they feel. And they have no way to vote you down either. They are stuck with what you have to do. And they can not just dismiss you or cancel you quietly bc you are assigned something for few days and they have to put up with their dislikes in their own heads. And most of what they would tell you would not be important after 24 h or so anyway. If you don’t believe it, just think how many of your own opinions, thoughts, or posts are feeling like ‘the past’ after 24 or 48 hours.

Besides, we all think we care but we mostly don’t. We care about talking about things but not as nearly close about doing something to make it better. I guess silent retreat is great to escape from continual criticism, opinions, feedback or expectations. That makes space for less self-criticism, less self-evaluation and more just being in the moment.

What we desperately try to establish as connection is often so superficial and surface like that having a break is a great way to explore how communion differs from connection and that we long for the deep touch more than 5 min opinion.

It’s also a good way to keep the distance from any ‘shocking news’ that comes about every week and about which we feel we are supposed to have an opinion and know enough to take sides or verbalize our thoughts, at least dump them into ‘the internets’. It’s a trap. And it wants to suck you into never ending discussions and digging deeper into something that really concerns you probably only in 5% or less. And the trap has an attachment: feeling of being irrelevant if you missed the ‘shocking news’ and you did not make any opinion on the matter.

There is a more solid Reality that the web of peoples ideas, opinions, expectations and feedbacks. That Reality has to break through that awful noise. Once it does, everything seems different. Things get distant and disappear quickly, those things we were taken by. And those things that seemed small but important grow into its right size. And we start seeing what is.