To enter or enact a retreat (from the Latin retrahere) is to draw together, in refuge, seclusion, separation, and sharing -- not in order to abandon active life with others, but to consider ourselves with others.
The choice to retreat, to move to a space away yet in the world, can open up the possibility of redressing forms of disparity and can disturb relations of power, even if the act itself may seem a reduction of means or a lack of means altogether.
By choosing to retreat, one may be seeking an opportunity to withdraw from the bombardment of information with which we are blessed and cursed today. To retreat might constitute a rejection of the deadened political status quo in order to nurture more radical possibilities of human communality. One may step away from mainstream society and human interaction by following a religious or spiritual vocation to retreat, entering a concentrated space of silence and meditation to re-centre living and dying.
All these modes of retreat point to opportunities for the strengthening and revitalization of body and spirit in order to return to that dangerous mess of social life and everyday consciousness that is caught up in the speed of contemporaneity.
Retreat is not abandonment of social challenges, political antinomies, or cultural dead ends, but a temporary condition whose intent is to generate permanent change.
