What a Weekend Retreat Taught Me About Creating Space

Editorial Note
This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring how people navigate tension between work, creativity, and life. It sits alongside other reflective pieces that acknowledge a simple truth: meaningful work often requires space, but space alone does not do the work for us.

What a Weekend Retreat Taught Me About Creating Space

I won’t pretend this came from a place of balance.

My pillars of life had drifted out of alignment. Work was heavy. Lockdown had left a residue I hadn’t fully acknowledged. And beneath it all was a persistent feeling that I should be creating more — and a quiet fear about what that might mean.

So I took a weekend retreat.

Not the romantic kind. No monastery. No grand reset. Just a small place, time alone, and a clear intention: to finally start something I’d been circling for years.

The work itself wasn’t new. The hesitation was.

For a long time, I’d been afraid to begin. Afraid of being seen. Afraid of distraction from “proper” work. Afraid that starting would mean committing — and that committing might mean failing in public.

So I did something deliberate. I removed myself from my usual environment and gave myself nowhere to hide.

The idea of a retreat is often presented as gentle and unstructured — rest, nature, reflection. Mine was different. I needed friction, not comfort. A clear creative goal gave me something to push against, something to focus my wandering attention.

It wasn’t peaceful in the way I’d imagined. The place was noisy. The plan was imperfect. The ambition was probably unrealistic.

And yet, something shifted.

Not because everything went smoothly — it didn’t — but because I stayed with the discomfort long enough to see it clearly. I discovered that changing location does not change who you are. It simply removes familiar distractions.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn once observed:

wherever you go, there you are.

You’ll find further reading on this theme, and many others, in the Cultivated reading list.

The retreat didn’t solve anything. But it revealed a few important things.

That fear loses power when you sit with it.
That momentum comes from starting, not planning.
That creative work often needs constraint, not freedom.

I also learned that retreats are not escapes. They are mirrors. They show you what you’ve been avoiding and what you’re ready to face.

Would I do it again? I hope so.

Not because it was perfect — it wasn’t — but because it created enough space to move something that had been stuck for years. And sometimes, that is enough.

A good life is not the absence of tension. It is learning how to work with it.

And occasionally, stepping away — even imperfectly — helps you see where to begin again.

Video

Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.

Photos from the retreat