Disconnect to reconnect

Every year I give myself a gift that consists of disconnecting from the world for five full days. To start with, I leave home without a mobile phone: detox, as they say today. I change the atmosphere with some friends who are pursuing the same goal and we go somewhere quiet, which doesn't have to be very far away. We spend many hours a day in front of a screen working, and we even give ourselves the illusion that we are resting by checking social networks on our mobile phones, when in reality we are exhausted from being hooked.

I spend those days in silence, that is, I don't talk to anyone, and no one talks to me. Silence helps me to be able to hear and listen again. The procession goes inside, as they say, but to get deep inside you have to peel away many layers of debris. The well-known journalist Miriam Meckel wrote a book a few years ago with the title "Brief an mein Leben" (Letter to my life). After a burn-out she had such a severe physical and psychological crisis that her doctor prescribed the following: you are going to spend three days in a clinic without visitors, without a mobile phone, without newspapers and the most important thing you have to do is to spend several hours a day looking out of the window. Miriam discovers that she had not processed many things in her life. For example, the death of her mother and the suicide of a friend. She came to the conclusion that "in Germany, asking questions about the meaning of life requires as much courage as attending a reception for the President of the Republic in your pyjamas".?

Indeed, it takes several days to discover the therapeutic value of silence. Silence heals and "speaks" but in a different way. Silence is not passive, quite the contrary. It is compatible with reading, with a walk, with many hours of sleep, or with prayer for those who consider themselves believers and want to renew their resources in faith. In these days of silence, I like to read great biographies of people who are familiar to me and who help me to understand the times in which I have lived through events that I have witnessed. For example, George Weigel's biography of John Paul II, or Peter Seewald's biography of Benedict XVI. It doesn't matter that these books are almost a thousand pages long. It takes me several retreats to read them.

A retreat of this kind has several phases. The first is to arrive. It means letting go, disconnecting, letting go, looking back, slowing down. The second is to take a deep breath and regenerate, i.e. to accept, start again, concentrate on the fundamentals, enjoy, repent, tidy up, throw away, break, correct. And the third and final phase: taking off, which means starting again, making resolutions, walking again, getting going and accelerating.

There are more and more management books that recommend solitude for the leader. For the "screen generation" it is a question of mental health. Active solitude bears fruit. We do not need action but reflexion. The Covid breaks have made us rediscover aspects of our lives that we had neglected: the value of human relationships, learning to enjoy ourselves differently without the need for noise, re-evaluating the beauty of nature and landscapes, being more grateful for what we have and not making our happiness depend on what we could have. In short, giving more importance to being than to having, to people than to things.