Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

In a more emulatable form of Merton’s retreat, Microsoft founder
and philanthropist Bill Gates has, twice a year for many years now,
taken what he calls a “think week.” He spends seven days alone in a
cabin in the forest. There, physically removing himself from the daily
interruptions of his work, he can really sit down and think.
He might be alone there, but he is hardly lonely. Gates reads—
sometimes hundreds of papers—quietly for hours at a time,
sometimes in print, sometimes off computer monitors that look out
over the water. He reads books too, in a library adorned with a
portrait of the author Victor Hugo. He writes long memos to people
across his organization. The only breaks he takes are a few minutes
to play bridge or go for a walk. In those solitary days in that cabin,
Gates is the picture of Thomas à Kempis’s line In omnibus requiem
quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro—“Everywhere I
have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
Do not mistake this for some kind of vacation. It is hard work—
long days, some without sleep. It is wrestling with complex topics,
contradictory ideas, and identity-challenging concepts. But despite
this struggle, Gates emerges recharged and refocused. He can see
further into the distance. He knows what he wants to prioritize, what
to assign his people to work on. He carries the quiet stillness of the
woods back to the complicated world he has to navigate as a
businessman and philanthropic leader.
Each of us needs to put ourselves, physically, in the position to do
that kind of deep work. We need to give our bodies, as Virginia Woolf
put it, a room of our own—even if only for a few stolen hours—where
we can think and have quiet and solitude. Buddha needed seclusion
in his search for enlightenment. He had to step away from the world,
go off by himself, and sit.
Don’t you think you would benefit from that too?
It’s hard to make that time. It’s hard (and expensive) to get away.
We have responsibilities. But they will be better for our temporary
disappearance. We will carry back with us the stillness from our
solitude in the form of patience, understanding, gratitude, and
insight.
In Leonardo’s fable, the stone abandoned the peaceful solitude of
the meadow for the road and came to regret it. Merton, for his part,