Pico Ayer
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
One day, some years ago, I looked around the small, temporary apartment I was sharing with my mother and saw no cause for hope. A wildfire had burnt our house to the ground and reduced every last thing inside it to ash. Every photo, every memento and childhood keepsake, all the handwritten notes that were the basis for my next three books, everything was gone. MUSIC PLAYS
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I needed to look after my mother as her only child, but I also needed to support my Japanese girlfriend and her two small children across the sea. I couldn't work out how to be in two places at the same time. A friend suggested I go to a Benedictine retreat house four hours up the California coast.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
If nothing else, he said, I'd have my own desk there and a private walled garden with dazzling ocean views, all for just $30 a night. What more did I have to lose, I thought? My future had disappeared overnight, and so had my past. On the long drive up, as ever, I heard myself fretting over deadlines, worried about leaving my mother behind, carrying on an argument with a faraway friend.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Then I turned onto a one-lane road that snaked up to the top of a mountain. I got out of my car 1,200 feet above the Pacific Ocean and stepped into a simple cell. Suddenly, in ways I couldn't explain, all the debates and anxieties that had been slicing me up 15 minutes earlier fell away. The sun burned on the water far below. A rabbit was standing on the splintered fence in my garden.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I stepped outside and was welcomed by a vast expanse of brush and blue for as far as I could see. I came inside again and began scribbling at the desk, recording everything around me. When I stood up, I had covered three pages, though barely twenty minutes had passed. I walked into the communal kitchen and brought back an apple and some salad.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I sat in a rocking chair, munching, and then, hours later, after darkness fell, I walked out into a great tumble of stars. Although I was alone in my silent cell, I didn't feel alone. The people I loved felt closer to me than when they were in the same room.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I took a long walk at daybreak along the monastery road, past benches here and there looking out to sea, and a smile from a stranger went through me as no sentence ever could. Often I just sat in a chair and did what is usually hardest for me, nothing at all. The monks who opened their doors, even to non-Christians like myself, made no demands on any visitor.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
They were ready to offer counsel if needed, but otherwise they were just working around the clock to ensure that all of us felt at home. When I stepped into the monastery bookstore on my second day, an elderly brother asked how I was doing. I love it, I said. He looked relieved. Clearly, silence wasn't always a blessing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Of course, it was liberation to be away from every distraction, but mostly I felt liberated from little Pico and all his chatter. I was freed of my social self and back in a silent self where I had no need of words or ideas. A lens cap had come off and now I could be filled by the world in all its wild immediacy. In the days that followed, I simply read books or wrote letters to friends.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I took the same walk again and again. Every morning when I awoke, I had no designs upon the day. I let the moment decide whether I'd pick up a postcard or just look out to sea. Over the next few months and years, I started going back. For two weeks, for three weeks, sometimes when the 15 retreat rooms were full, staying with the monks in their enclosure.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Occasionally, I went there when I was jet-lagged, and even the silence couldn't help me then. Sometimes I arrived just as the radiance of the Big Sur coastline was shattered by torrential storms. All night I sat in my little trailer on the hill, unable to see another light or sign of human habitation. The wilderness felt merciless and terrifying.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
But even when doubts or shadows arose, I realized I'd much rather confront them in this quiet sanctuary than when I was caught up in rush hour traffic or the cacophony of cable news.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When my father was suddenly raced into the hospital, the only thing I could think to do was drive four hours one morning just to sit on a bench along the monastery road for two hours and then drive the four hours back. Isn't it selfish to leave your loved ones behind so you can go and restore yourself, a kind friend asked me.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Not if it's the only way I can learn to be a little less selfish, was my reply. when my daughter at 13 was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, I knew that sitting in silence above the blue-green waters for three days was the best way I could find the clarity and calm I would need as soon as I stepped back into her hospital ward.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I couldn't make Sachi's sickness go away, but I could try to protect her from my own useless worries and resentments. Spending time in silence put a frame around my agitated thoughts and disclosed something real that stretched beyond and behind them. To come upon a place that exists outside the realm of constant change makes change a little bit less scary.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
In all my seven decades, I've never seen so many so close to despair as they are right now. A world is fractured. Wars are breaking out on every side. Wildfires, like the one that rewrote my life, tear through every hill. In those circumstances, the simple journey into silence allows me to step out of the moment and into something more expansive.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Not everyone I know can afford to go on retreat, but some liberation is always at hand if only you can sit quietly away from your devices, seek out a temple or church, just take a walk. Years ago, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton observed, when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
It's hard to get tired of the birdsong above the wooden shed or the sun rising above that distant hill. So often it's my mind that makes my problems. It cuts the world up into you and me and complicates the simple. After more than a hundred trips into wide-awake silence, I give thanks every time I come back to a reality far bigger than myself.