Reading multiple choice

I went on the retreat for the wrong reasons, which is to say that I went because an editor asked me to. The brief was to spend five days at a centre in the Welsh hills where guests are forbidden to speak, read, write or use their phones, and then to write about it. I suspect I was chosen precisely because I am the least contemplative person in the office. I check my email in the queue at the supermarket. I listen to podcasts at one and a half times their normal speed so that I can fit more of them in. The idea of five days with nothing to do but think filled me with something close to panic.

The centre itself was disarmingly ordinary: a converted farmhouse with low ceilings, a large kitchen and a meditation room that smelled faintly of woodsmoke. On the first evening, the twelve of us were allowed to introduce ourselves before the silence began. There was a surgeon who had been told by her own doctor to rest, a retired couple who came every year, and a young man who admitted, to general laughter, that he was only there because he had lost a bet. Then the director, a softly spoken woman called Mair, gave a short talk, rang a small bell, and nobody said another word for five days.

The first day was the hardest thing I have done in years, and I say that as someone who once ran a marathon with almost no training. Without the constant background noise of news and messages, my mind did not grow calm, as the brochure had promised. Instead, it grew louder. Old conversations replayed themselves; tasks I had forgotten about presented themselves with great urgency; I composed, in my head, several long and furious emails to people who had wronged me years before. During the afternoon session, when we were supposed to be sitting quietly, I found myself counting the planks in the ceiling.

Mair had warned us about this. In her talk the evening before, she had said that silence does not create noise; it merely reveals the noise that is already there. At the time I had taken this for the sort of thing people say at retreats. By the second day I was beginning to suspect that she was simply describing what happens.

Then, on the third morning, something changed, though I would struggle to say exactly what. I was standing at the kitchen window, waiting for the kettle to boil, and I noticed that I was watching a blackbird on the lawn with complete attention. I was not thinking about the blackbird, or about the article I would have to write, or about anything at all. I was simply watching it. The moment lasted perhaps a minute, and as soon as I became aware of it, it was over. But it was enough to make me realise how rarely I give anything my full attention, and how much of my life I spend somewhere other than where I actually am.

I would like to report that I returned to London a transformed person. I did not. Within an hour of switching my phone back on I had answered thirty emails, and within a week my podcasts were back at their usual speed. But I have kept one habit. Every morning, before I look at a screen, I spend ten minutes sitting by the window with a cup of tea, doing nothing at all. It is not much. Mair, I suspect, would say that it is a start.