In real life, my days are gloriously chaotic, tangled
and usually loud. My husband and I are at the hub of a large family which is
rapidly expanding both geographically and numerically. We ourselves are often
(as my mother puts it) running off madly in all directions; besides Family
Business we travel and explore, he has work that he loves and I’m in school
trying to get ready for whatever Phase 3 looks like. We are extremely pleased
with one another, with The Fam and with the general shape of things. In one way
or another, it's always been like this. I have never been able to see the appeal of monastic life.
That has changed.
Since being here, I’ve learned the joy of silence –
not the silence where you know there’s a toddler breaking something or a
teenager getting pregnant in the next room, but the silence of simplicity.
While I am here, I am responsible only for keeping myself alive (I don’t even
have to cook or empty my trash) and for thinking.
There are places in the world - monasteries and nunneries and ashrams and ivy towers
of all sorts – made specifically for thinking.
A few of these places – like this one –
have sheltered millenniums’-worth of thinkers, and that deliberation has seeped
into the very stones.
Here, there is time.
One marks it, not by the procession of clock hands, but by the procession of one’s
thoughts. Following a single thought,
uninterrupted, from beginning to end has been a completely new experience for
me, but it is possible here; the place is made for it. The gardens are restful,
the architecture is inspiring. The paths are laid out for the express purpose
of helping a walker mull over a problem – a bit of verse or a logical argument –
so that his mind can march in tandem with his feet, or it can run off into the
brush after the rabbits.
It’s not always quiet
here, as it is (I understand) in some cloistered communities. Everyone who
lives here is working on and for some purpose, and the vitality is
contagious. Here you realize that nearly everyone you meet in the Real World
has stopped growing, and that what you missed when you left school was that sense
of nearly everyone you met being fully engaged, exploring, and learning something new. Thinking is surprisingly difficult work,
and here it spills onto the grass and the walkways and the streets, with
laughter and shrieking, jangling ukuleles and practiced soliloquies. Somehow, it’s not
obnoxious. Somehow, you understand it; you know what it’s like, after all. You think, too.
We are sheltered here, but we are not isolated. We
hear what’s happening in the world; we discuss it, we go out into it, and
(presumably) there are those here who will someday affect it. But sometimes, as
now, when you can hear nothing but the wind in the trees and the Sunday-evening
carillon of the bells in the Tower, it’s easy to imagine how someone could give
up the outside world altogether. It’s easy to see the appeal of spending years
trying to work out the answer to the question, “Well . . . so what?”
I wouldn’t trade my crowded, complex, hilarious life
for any other; but perhaps one does not need the noise for its own sake. Perhaps
I can take a bit of the Cloister back with me. Maybe I can plant more roses and
hydrangeas, fill more bookshelves, and spend more time walking. What I’d most
like, though, is to return from this temporarily contemplative life with the
habit of thinking. I’d like to hold
on to the notion that finishing the book is as important as finishing the
laundry, and that tending to myself is as valuable as tending to everyone else.
Most of all, I’d like to remember that I don’t need to be Doing Something to be
doing something.
Loving and
thinking: that would make Phase 3 the best of all possible worlds.
