Every year I leave my work and my family and all the many distractions of my everyday
life behind and go on a five-day retreat in a remote monastery in the country to clear my mind by
doing and thinking of nothing. I take long walks in the mornings and in the afternoons sit quietly
reflecting on the essential meaning of life. The purpose of this, what I would in my everyday life
call being idle, is to rejoin the world renewed, refreshed, rejuvenated, restored.
But I can’t help noticing that the monks spend those same five days not in the idleness in
which I am engaged, the idleness I have been led to believe is essential to renewal, rejuvenation,
and restoration, at all. Not at all. No. They spend those same five days cooking, cleaning,
weeding the garden, harvesting the vegetables, and bottling the honey they sell by way of a lively
mail-order business. They spend their quiet moments not sitting in meditation, but mending their
own worn-out and wretched habits.
Sue Allison was a reporter for Life Magazine; her writing has also been published or is forthcoming in Best American Essays, Antioch Review, Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, DASH, El Portal, Harvard Review, (mac)ro(mic), New South, Streetlight Magazine, Threepenny Review, Flights, Fourth Genre, The Diagram, Isacoustic, Potato Soup Journal, Puerto del Sol, River Teeth, and a Pushcart Prize collection. She holds a BA in English from McGill University and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.