Last weekend I left a noisy restaurant to find quiet in a place I’d never been to before. I went directly from the restaurant to a Buddhist Retreat, a gathering of those seeking a spiritual path to the quiet center of their lives.
Restaurants have become a miniature version of our chaotic world, a place where voices and canned music compete to be the loudest. After one more evening struggling to hear the person across the table from me, I hungered less for food than for quiet. I had read enough about Retreats to believe I would find tranquility in one of them.
I began meditating seven years ago when I lost my wife of nearly seventy years. When I meditated, I felt Muriel’s presence deep within my being, my soul. I’m not an aspiring Buddhist, but meditating took me to the stillness deep within me where I found wisdom that helped me heal.
When a friend who also meditates told me the Florida Community of Mindfulness in Tampa was conducting a Retreat that weekend I decided to go.
I was not sure my meditating thirty minutes a day qualified me for forty-eight hours of silence and talks on Buddhism by spiritual guides I worried the others attending would be far more active in their spiritual practice than I was.
I wasn’t confident I could endure a weekend of silence and long intervals of sitting and walking meditation. But I saw the four-hour drive across Florida as a step taking me further along the path I hoped to follow deeper into my nineties. I would attend my first, and perhaps only, Retreat.
Forty of us gathered at the Community to hear an orientation on all that awaited us between Friday and Sunday afternoons. Being told our spiritual guides expected us to ask questions during their talks and share emotions about all we were learning eased my concerns. Yes, there would be almost unbroken silence, but we were also going to exchange thoughts about the art of meditation and finding peace in a world jagged with war and uncertainty.
The growing confidence I had come to the right place burst into certainty after we left the orientation for dinner. Even the muted pad of our bare feet seemed to violate the soundlessness that enfolded the dining room. Behind a curtained wall, the small kitchen staff prepared simple, but hearty dishes in silence.
No chairs scraped the floor as we sat with plates laden at the serving table. Metal knives, forks and spoons made no sound as they touched our ceramic plates. . Some ate silently with their eyes closed to savor the act of dining. I kept mine open, but remembered how much I enjoyed eating when noise didn’t drive food into submission.
In a noisy restaurant, hearing is the only one of the five senses we call upon. Smell, taste, touch and sight subordinate themselves to hearing words emerging from the din.
Instead of struggling to hear in this dining room, I was smelling the pea soup, seeing and tasting strawberries as sweet as those picked and fed to me when I was a child. The crusty bread was dense to the touch and as it warmed its fragrance made each of us hurry for a second piece.
Hearing was the absent sense, called upon only to listen to a prayer of thanks for the food bestowed upon us by a Benevolent Being.
After dinner, we began a walking meditation in an Asian garden that took us through generations of bamboo and plants resilient enough to thrive oceans away from their birthplace. Statues of The Buddha smiled on us as we walked past. No voice intruded on the splash of streams or the whir of humming birds as we walked through a garden throbbing with life.
That night we went to bed early, knowing we were going to spend fourteen hours Saturday, guided along a path of learning, mindfulness and meditation. Of the forty of us on the journey, I was the oldest by a quarter-century. I was experienced enough to know I would eat again in noisy restaurants and be assaulted by a turbulent universe. But the serenity I found at the Retreat had made its way inside me. It would be there whenever I needed it.
I made choices I would follow when I wasn’t at a Retreat. I would no longer read while eating alone at home. I would push aside the book to feel, smell, see and taste the food I had prepared. I would visualize the person picking the vegetables I was cooking, the fisherman who caught the salmon I was grilling. I would hear the cry of the blue jays darting past my kitchen window.
I would go far less frequently to restaurants. Instead, I would invite close friends to dinner at my home and cook there with my children and grandchildren during their visits.
Returning to my home from Tampa I was certain of something else: In the stillness within me a voice was assuring me the path I was on was taking me where I wanted to go.
Bob’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and in Next Avenue, the publication of the Public Broadcasting Service. His book, “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” was published by McGraw Hill and is in five languages.
