When I left my seven-day retreat - seven days with no access to phones or computers, no music, no books, nothing to do but look myself straight in the eye and see what, if anything, I might find - I didn't go home; not right away. Part of the commitment I made when I signed up for the retreat was to spend the two days following my departure somewhere quiet, all by myself. The hope was that I'd be able to use this time to figure out how to take what I'd learned into my *real* life: the earsplittingly loud, endlessly busy one filled with responsibilities and distractions and triggers and proposals that need to be written and homework that needs to be finished and meals that need to be cooked.
So I booked two nights in an Airbnb in a town called Occidental. I'd never been before; never even heard of it. I found it because I did a quick search for inexpensive places to stay in Napa, and picked one that sat next to a little pond, and had a hammock strung up between two apple trees that I thought looked like a place I might like to nap.
I expected to feel frantic during those first couple of days on the "outside," as it were - panicked by the number of emails I'd missed; desperate to find out what had happened to everything from my kids to the news cycle while I'd been gone. But on the morning of my last day at the retreat I was handed back my phone...and I didn't want it, to the point where I felt full-on physical revulsion.
