Retreat

Walking away from conflict isn't the only way to embrace this word's many meanings.

This geraniums paper cut was created out of what remains and what I removed. (Image: B.G. Merkle © 2025)

Dear Troublemakers,

I’m gonna do a basic word nerd thing [1] today.

The noun retreat has a lot of meanings, [2] including to withdraw “from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable,” “the process of receding from a position or state attained,” several military meanings, and as an archaic label for “an establishment for mentally ill persons.”

But, there are also two meanings of the noun retreat that stand in direct contrast to the challenge-affiliated ones: “a place of privacy or safety” and “period of group withdrawal,” usually under instruction or guidance of someone else. I find it quite fascinating that a word can encompass nearly opposite meanings.

But perhaps that shouldn’t seem so remarkable, given the complex and often contrary ways our human nature manifests in each of us. After all, I love socializing and hosting big potlucks. I’m also deeply content to ramble for hours across a prairie, accompanied only by my dog and our fellow wild plants and creatures. I am loud, but can be quiet, and I struggle with loud noises and loud music. I appreciate both modern conveniences and have spent much of my life doing things the hard way for fun (e.g., gardening, writing on a typewriter, home brewing, preserving jam, darkroom photography).

In any case, as you read this, I am “on retreat,” or perhaps, “at a retreat.” In fact, I am co-leading this retreat. The focus of our week away is to write proposals [3]—any kind of proposal that aims to persuade someone to support our individual work. Our cohort includes people working on sabbatical and fellowship proposals, book proposals, and grant proposals. The cohort aims to garner support for project topics ranging from trauma memoir and nature poetry to environmental humanities teaching, neuroscience, bears, and climate impacts on amphibians. We all know things we can share with each other, and my co-facilitator and I have things we know we can offer the group.

Above all, we’re offering a week out of time, a week suspended from everyone’s ordinary responsibilities and routines. We’re driving across the state to ensure people step away. We’re staying at a home that has poor internet and no cell service, to enable people to concentrate. Above all, we have only a few required activities throughout the week, most conducted during group meals. The rest of the schedule is wide open, so that people can think, read, write. But perhaps most importantly, the schedule is open so that people can rest—like, take afternoon naps!—walk around in the surrounding prairie and perhaps make an unlikely, helpful connection between nature and their work, or between their work and the splendid abundance of art in the house. There is loads of unstructured space in the agenda so that participants can also truly meet each other, swap ideas, and foster the marvelous, runaway brainstorming that seems most possible when we permit ourselves to fully indulge in being in physical space with other people who are generously minded, curious about the world, and full of interesting knowledge.

We ask people to articulate goals for their week, both when they apply and on the first night of the retreat. And then every morning and afternoon, we ask them to state (and post on an apple-red fridge!) their micro goals for each third of the day. We also talk in a focused way, over meals, about various strategic and rhetorical aspects of persuasive writing that can enhance everyone’s proposals. We’ve run this retreat a few times now, and we’ve found this structure, in balance with the broader container of scheduled “freedom,” provides a productive tension between constraints and intellectual elbow room.

I’m recognizing that same tension in the meaning of retreat itself: both a withdrawl from potential danger and a place or activity of rest and renewal. Indeed, the latter seems essential for embracing the beneficial side of risk and challenge. When considered that way, it’s hitting me as inevitable yet remarkable that one word does all that work.

It also occurs to me that I can use a reflection on such a multi-faceted word to encourage me to recognize all the work that I do. We slog through (or thrive in) our everydays. We dream and hope, we complain and resist. We desire, we struggle, we eat, sleep, and do a host of necessary bodily functions. We might manage or facilitate many of the same for other people. We create, we supervise, we clock in and out. However we spend our days, most people I’ve ever met or heard about do in fact experience and contain tensions that manifest as the complex, vital people we each are. Most of us can’t retreat for even a few hours, let alone a week, from our ordinary lives. But even within my regular patterns and responsibilities, I’ve started noticing the nuance and contrast of retreat. It’s making me ponder how I might embrace some of this tension, rather than resisting it as—let’s be honest—I usually do.

Put another way, all spring I’ve been bumping into essays, memes, and books that have a common theme (at least to me). That is, a lot of what I’m encountering in the world lately insists that every human life (or every life, period) entails struggle and challenges. One striking way of putting it (though I can’t find back the source) argued that many of us spend most of our human lives waiting for our life to start. We think, “this hardship isn’t my real life,” or “just wait until I graduate/get a job/get married/retire, then I’ll live my true life.” And, of course, as every sage and and smart aleck decorative pillow notes, how we spend our hours and our days is how we spend our lives. [4] So, if I spend all day or all month resisting what my life is, then I’m dwelling on the negative side of the tension in human reality…and that becomes all my life is.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve written a lot about negative aspects of academia, society, the way we train scientists, the way we devalue scicomm, and the list goes on. But, thinking about retreat as a balance, rather than an escape, is nudging me to think about how that balance shows up in my life. Or rather, how I might work to experience life as more balanced. [5] And, that highlights a crucial way in which I retreated in January this year.

Through a series of reflection and planning activities, I realized that one of the things creating a lot of angst in my life was my desire for people in academia to (a) value, (b) prioritize, and (c) work on some things I think are really important. (No need to guess what, it’s the running themes I talk about here every week!) And yes, it was my desire for these things—for people to act in a certain way—that was the source of my consternation. In reality, everyone has their own lives, interests, and responsibilities, ergo, their own priorities. But as long as I kept pushing for, expecting, and not seeing a perfect alignment between mine and theirs, I was in a realm of tension that wasn’t serving me, wasn’t helping my professional relationships, and wasn’t leaving me much energy to just. do. the. darn. things. that I cared about.

Thanks to those reflection activities (and several re-reads of the book that introduced me to this idea [6]), I recognized and acknowledged this dilemma. Then finally, in January, I resolved to change something. I decided not to talk anyone into anything. At all. For the entire year. I retreated from pushing my agenda on anyone who doesn’t want to work toward it or already see value in it. No debating, either. Which is not to say I gave up. On the contrary. I’ve shifted my focus to working with people who are already on board, who already do care about these same things. I already know some of these people. I’ve been working with them for years. Others I’m just meeting now, five months into 2025, because I’ve started looking for people to work with, not looking for people to convince. This might seem like an obvious shift, but it wasn’t for me. It’s also not at all intuitive or easy to switch gears from convincing to just collaborating with like-minded folks.

I should have done it years ago, though! I’m finding an aura of safety, even a sense of restfulness, in committing this year to working with people already heading in the same directions. We’re working on enhancing graduate training in scicomm. We’re working on a weekly community meal and a tool library in my town. We’re avoiding the doomloop and committing to time together. We’re working on supporting and affirming each other’s boundaries and limits, instead of resisting them.

In a sense, I’m finding people who are also retreating from bad habits that generate tension and conflict. And, in doing so, we’re experiencing the supportive, generative nature of being on retreat. Together.

How about you?

What habits of mind or interaction might you be stuck in that are generating unnecessary tension? What is one action you could take to step outside that pattern and create a more restful, generative habit?

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NOTES

[1] But really, if you want to deeply nerd out on wordery, you gotta check out Sesquiotica and the author (James Harbeck’s) Word Tasting Notes.

[2] See Merriam-Webster and Online Etymology Dictionary for definition details.

[3] I’m a big fan of em dashes. I use ‘em all the time. ;) If you find em dashes in this essay, it’s because I am indulging in my human capacity to use punctuation to convey meaning, pacing, and organization in my writing. (In other words, this post, and every bit of content at School of Good Trouble, is 100% human-created. No LLMs, no AI images.)

[4] Annie Dillard said this in an especially famous way.

[5] It helps enormously, of course, that I have a roof over my head, plenty of food, and a job that covers my bills, while living in a relatively safe part of the world. My understanding, though, from a lot of books and accounts from people who had none of those things, is that this notion of balanced reaction to/perspective of our lives is relevant for all humans.

[6] I first learned about the notion that desire is the root of all suffering (and that a lot of our self-inflicted suffering comes not from wanting wealth or fame or possessions, but wanting people to act differently) from The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. I re-read it every year, for a refresher and for new insights.