:: March 2008: Volume 7/Number 2

Traveling For Refuge

sometimes our sightseeing takes us home

by Pico Iyer

The truest kind of travel is always inward; when we want to be moved or transported, we’re really talking about our heart, our senses or our imagination, more than our bodies. So when we take a holiday, what we’re looking for, in my experience, is not so much a break from our homes as from our habits. Go to Tibet, and suddenly you see your life in Glendale in a different light; even take a day off and go to a local spa, and what you bring back is not just the scent of sandalwood and healing oils, but a fresh and renewed perspective on your life. The true voyage of discovery, as Proust famously wrote, consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in seeing the old landscapes with new eyes.

I sometimes think that’s why many of us, when we have free time, travel not to experience more diversion, amusement and color, but to have less: what we really want is the luxury of stillness, of quietude, of not being bombarded by a world in which there are more than 4,820,000 listings on Google just for the phrase “information overload.” People will always travel to Hawaii and the Himalayas for a reminder of what the natural and the man-made world can offer, for a repletion of wonder. But just as many – and more and more – will go to a retreat center, or a yoga studio, to a spa that offers silence as a way to propel themselves into all the unexpected universes that lie within. This is travel not just as transport, but as transformation.

For me, then, the single most exciting trip in the world is the one that takes me in my car just three hours up the coast from my home in Santa Barbara, to a Catholic hermitage perched high above the sea. I’m not a Catholic, but it doesn’t matter: the luxuries the place offers are silence and space, and its amenities include freedom from telephone, television, computer and dogma. Far from everything I know, surrounded by nothing but rabbits and blue sky, I am taken out of my workday self and into a self as wide as space. I can climb, dive or surrender to the moment; I can draw, think or walk. The only guidebook I need is a favorite book of verse.

All varieties of holidaymaker visit this monastery: Porsche drivers and students of Buddhism, champion athletes and real estate agents who choose to spend a whole week in a darkened room alone. Some of them come just to enjoy a piece of unreal estate with some of the finest ocean views around, others because they wish to rethink their lives and recall the things they love. There is no oppressive piety in the place (I seldom attend any of the services) and there is no great discomfort, since that in itself would be a distraction: heartening meals can be had three times a day, rooms are well heated, and you can pay for postcards in the gift shop with a Visa card.

What the monastery offers is a freedom from concern. In silence and in emptiness, you can enjoy a vacation from all the things that vacations usually entail: from frantic guides and tour buses, from airports and inflation. Eyes closed, you can see the things that matter. I go to the monastery only three or four times a year, often for no more than a couple of days. But even two days in absolute quiet can feel like two years; and even two nights walking underneath the stars can take you so far away from your routine that you return to the world reborn.

There are many things one could say about a place that shakes you up and offers a change of time as much as space. But the main thing is that it teaches privilege and luxury of a different kind. Days without plan seem to last forever, and rooms without clutter make space expand. Removed from the telephone, I am never reminded of who I am supposed to be; released from the TV, I am never reminded of what I am meant to care about. Every holiday takes you out of yourself, but some take you all the way back to a higher, purer self you thought you had forgotten.

All of us, I suspect, have such sanctuaries in our lives, whether they are quiet places in the garden, or friends who bring us calm; they may take the form of aerobics classes or sessions of tai chi or weekly cooking lessons. All of us try to find ways to stop, to take stock of our priorities. The danger in most lives, after all, is not so much that we are doing the wrong thing as that we are moving so fast, along a darkened road, that we cannot see whether what we are doing is wrong or not. To go to a monastery for a holiday is simply a way of acknowledging that a holiday timetable can be as tyrannous as a workplace and the urge to “do” Big Sur is as onerous as a list of chores. There are sights in the temple: the fox in my private garden, the light upon the sea. And there are activities: I can eat with the monks, or meditate. But the real point of going there is to refine one’s sense of what sight and activity truly mean.

It’s easy to see the perils in such indulgence: when we go off to find ourselves, the selves we find may look dangerously like an MTV video being shown on a 1960s TV set. And following your bliss makes sense only if your bliss is rigorously and searchingly defined. Since many of the most unworldly sites – my Benedictine hermitage included – are an easy drive from Hollywood, the very beauty of such idylls has a value-added tax: when I return from the temple, I feel so lit up and cleaned out and exalted that the smallest reminder of the world hits me with a thump.

Yet the need for stillness and slowness becomes more pressing as the world grows more intrusive and revved up: now that the information superhighway reaches right into our living rooms, all of us are roadside casualties. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that more and more people are seeking out spas or spots of quiet, practicing meditation or traveling to the mountains; in the age of cell phones and e-mail, nothing is more precious than being out of reach.

Travel itself, I have often thought, is a kind of monastic exercise: we live more simply on the road, with relatively few possessions. Our resumes are left at home, and we live at the mercy of kind strangers. We spend long hours alone, and have the time to think, and read and look at our lives from a distance. We even find ourselves sitting still, wearing clothes so old they feel like hair shirts, and praying to gods we didn’t know we revered.

My chosen sanctuary feels like a return trip, and a return to something priceless: more a confirmation, really, than a discovery, and more a recollection than a realization. That is why I do not give away the name of my particular refuge. If it is the right place for you, then you will find it (as I did) by word of mouth – and you will find in it everything you want; if not, you will doubtless drive past its entrance on the highway and follow the winding curves to some other place that is – though you may not know it yet – not just a retreat, but a step forward. Whatever the travels, transformation is the destination, and it is not such a long drive from home.

Pico Iyer is the author of the Sufi novel Abandon, and a forthcoming book on the XIVth Dalai Lama, The Open Road.

to go to a monastery for a holiday is simply a way of acknowledging that a holiday timetable can be as tyrannous as a workplace and the urge to “do” Big Sur is as onerous as a list of chores

 

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