The Sense in Absence

It is early in the new year of 2023 and I am spending three days, mid-week, at the ‘peaceful, paradise barn’ in rural Alberta. I first came here, two years ago, for concentrated bursts of work on my master’s thesis, and since then I have continued to use it as an occasional retreat space; a place to simply and quietly be me.

Fabrice Villard

Yesterday I visited with a friend in a nearby town and she asked about these trips to ‘the barn’. Her question held a gentle curiosity about the purpose of spending time away on one’s own, as I have done, for many years. At first I wasn’t sure how to respond; momentarily stifled by an imagined need to articulate what it was that I gained, or achieved, or got from these visits. And then I saw that this orientation was unhelpful and something inside me flipped and landed on a single word: absence. I realised it was about enjoying a sense of absence. The absence of everyday routine practicalities and concerns. The absence of a familiar environment. The absence of other people and their energies. The absence, as much as possible, of the noise and stimulation of the world. In short, the absence of everything that is not me.

It made me think about absence as the antonym of presence, the value and virtue of which—to personal and professional relationships—is now well-extolled and supported by research across various fields. When we are present in our interactions with others—whether partners, friends, clients or strangers—we show up and we pay attention. We are open, aware and available to the other, inviting a field of connection that holds no agenda, expectation or intention. We are listening. We are noticing. We are responding. We are really there.

Our capacity to be present to others depends on our capacity to be present to ourselves. If we are unable to listen, notice and respond, within, then we’ll be disconnected from how we listen, notice and respond without. In my experience becoming present to one’s self is a long, slow process of acceptance and recognition. It’s easy to dismiss the calling to ‘find yourself’ as clichéd, but like many clichés, this simple instruction holds a depth of meaning that transcends time. And the beauty within the journey of discovery is that you are already there, ready and quietly waiting to be found.

For me at least, this is where absence comes in. Denuded of distraction we are locatable. We are allowed. We have space to gently prise ourselves open, look inside, and be tender with what we find. At first, this can be a lot, and much of it may not be pleasant. But over time, and with caring persistence, we find ways to endure ourselves; to trust the glimpses of goodness we see within and to recognise the journey of becoming whole—

of coming home—as inherently worthwhile; examining, cleaning and patiently re-weaving the threads of our own fabric until one day we realise we’re a magic carpet of life, upon which all there really is to do is lay back and ride.

Allowing yourself time to enjoy a sense of absence is not the same as shirking responsibilities, giving up, or checking out. It’s more about negotiating and devoting space to attend to the quietest parts of you; the voices that rarely get heard above the din of daily life. It’s about taking time to step back, withdraw and reflect. To deeply listen within. To notice how you really are, and to respond to your own uninhibited needs with kindness, compassion and maybe even gay abandon.

In order to grow and balance our capacity to be genuinely present to ourselves and to others, we must learn to befriend silence, stillness and solitude; the golden gifts of absence. In the same way as the space between notes generates beauty, poignancy or excitement in music, the rich inner landscape we come to know through absence generates the fundamental ground and power of our presence. When we take the time to warmly indulge in absence we realise that presence was never its opposite to begin with. Instead, like notes and silence, movement and stillness, space and emptiness, the two are inevitably and contentedly interdependent.