The Role of Reflection

The seeds of our future thoughts collect in our mind moment to moment as we move through life.  Fragments of conversations replayed, images of people and scenes stick to the mind like a collage. 

When we slow down to reflect, we give the mind an opening to pause, to breathe, to consider the layers of accumulated experience.  We naturally sort through these things as we drive or walk in the evening, but it is sometimes helpful to offer the mind a bigger space, a stretch of time, a period of silence explicitly for reflection.

In this silence, we give the mind permission to distance itself from the intensity of thinking and the obligation of doing and to settle and turn within.  In times like this, we sift quietly through the detritus of the recent days, and if the silence is long enough of the larger recurring waves of thoughts we have been pushing aside because we had no time.

Intentional silence is a gift to the mind, an offer to the self, to clarify and simplify the space inside.  In this time together at Prindle, we have included in the design, intense periods of conversation punctuated by spaces for reflection.  Our hope is that in these spaces, our more subtle currents of experience and recurring questions will come flowing back to us in ways that allow us to make new meaning from old experience, to recall our past sense of purpose or vocation, and to consider whether it still holds true in these times.

We believe these spaces for reflection may evoke increased clarity around the bigger questions of calling, meaning, and belief we will be talking about and writing about together.  We may also find that by returning to silence over these days, we expand our inner capacity, breathing more deeply, feeling refreshed, and seeing in new ways.

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