Member-only story
The Power of a Personal Retreat
How one night to myself gave me new life.
It was the incredulous reactions of my loved ones that clued me in that I was about to do something unusual.
My husband: “Wait, you want to spend the night away? Alone??”
My best friend: “But…what are you going to do exactly?”
My son: “Mommy, why do you want to be all by yourself?”
I was coming up on my 45th birthday and couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than sweet, sweet solitude. As an introvert always surrounded by people (including my extremely talkative 6-year-old), my batteries desperately needed a recharge.
I hit on the idea after reading Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindberghs’s classic book of meditations on womanhood, written during her own personal retreat at a beach house in the 1950s.
As she wrote:
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
Somehow amid all the pressures of being a wife and working mother — not to mention chief cook and bottle washer — I had lost the essence of myself. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t connect with my inner voice. I needed silence, and space, and I needed it now.
