"Yoga retreats" and our daily defeats

The end of September, the real start of the year, is coming. I have always loved this month when we still are full of the memories of our summer, we are tanned, we look healthy, full of projects, of things to improve and mend. Armed with the confidence that we can do so. A fresh memory of the fact that life isn’t so bad after all. The start of January is different, you wake up after a night where you felt obliged to have fun and you did not have nearly as much as you thought you should have. January is accusatory, and September is encouraging.?

This summer, one notable trend was the rise of "retreats" – escapes to serene locations for yoga, nature, and healing. Perhaps driven by my mother's affinity for staying on-trend or her commitment to the "tough love" approach, I found myself unwittingly scheduled for a few days in the remote Albanian countryside, courtesy of my uncle. Initially, I was annoyed, as I'm not exactly a country enthusiast. I tend to get restless after a few days without the noise and bustle of city life. However, as I contemplated the opportunity to spend five uninterrupted days in the village of my childhood, surrounded by cousins and grandparents, my perspective shifted. I saw it as a chance to rekindle my connection to that place, to revisit my grandmother's abandoned house, and to indulge in simple pleasures like reading, writing, exploring the fields, and indulging in my guilty pleasure – Turkish soap operas. A word of caution about those shows: they may set unrealistic expectations for romantic love and Turkish men. In reality, not many men today are willing to risk their empires for a humble maiden, and the streets of Istanbul don't exactly teem with Sultans.

Expectations:

Reality:

But that wasn't the only reality check I encountered during my "retreat" at my uncle's place. I decided to join in their daily routine, an endeavor that proved more challenging than I anticipated. The day began at 4 a.m. with milking cows and guiding them to pasture, where the fresh air and morning dew refreshed our spirits. At 5 a.m., we meticulously filled 40 plastic bottles with fresh milk, a task my aunt executed with uncanny precision. I, on the other hand, struggled to keep my eyes open. Following that, at 6 a.m., we embarked on a journey to deliver these bottles to clients in the city. Only after completing the rounds did we allow ourselves a well-deserved break – a cup of coffee and honey petulla at a nearby café. We returned home to bake fresh bread, prepare lunch with garden-fresh ingredients, steal a brief nap after the meal, clean a sizable villa, tend to the cows again, whip up a lighter dinner, and retire by 10 p.m. The cycle repeated itself for the remaining days, without deviation.

As I observed them, a phrase that I had read somewhere and did not fully understand hit me like a slap in the face.

“Vulgarity arises when authenticity is lost. Authenticity is lost when we seek it.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Immersing myself in their daily life I had to admit that I had lost authenticity. Here I was in the house I had seen being built brick by brick by my uncle with hard-earned money when I was a child and in which I used to hide when playing hide and seek and I noticed everything like a stranger. I was analyzing as an outsider, not truly involved. I was amazed by things that for them were normal. I was like the kids I used to make fun of when I first arrived in Italy. How impressed they were at the view of a simple chicken, while I notified them that I used to help my grandma skin them and prepare them for dinner. That never helped me be popular at school. When I asked my uncle and aunt what was it all about, they shrugged and said “work is dignity and we hope to leave this to our kids”. The efforts of today, with in mind the wellbeing of someone else in the future.

I ponder if what so many of us are looking for in those retreats is precisely this: deep and profound involvement in what we are doing. My uncle and aunt see the result of their work every day, it is concrete, and their achievement is as tactile as possible. I look at many of my peers and me and most of our jobs consist of sending emails back and forth. It is not realistic that we can or want all to become farmers but maybe those escapes are a cry for help. A need to go far from a life that pushes us to numb ourselves constantly with a phone in our hands that we no longer even use for calling and messaging. The fact that we are on this merry-go-round, but we don't even know who we are doing it for. Only ourselves isn’t satisfying long term.

“Retreat” funnily enough is a military term: “withdraw from enemy forces as a result of their superior power or after a defeat”. What is making us feel defeated? And who is our enemy? The phone that we no longer use for its intended purpose but to constantly compare our edited lives. The gadgets we use to measure our performances because we are no longer happy about simply running for the pleasure of it. The fact that we plan to the minute our life in our calendars. Even the books we read, we read to improve. Our existence becomes a performance, perpetually subject to refinement.

I wonder if it is possible to create a life where we consciously retreat every day from this madness. At 10 pm we go to sleep with a fatigued body and a peaceful soul like my uncles do. But during our moments of freedom, rather than escaping from life, we would explore ways to enrich it further. Enjoying it like a tomato with bread and cheese after a day of genuine commitment.

Vilma Djala