I would like to say yes, but I don’t know if I could. Perhaps I could have once, not now. I think it would be the experience of a lifetime. I know that I would come back changed. I would expect to come back with a deep and abiding peace and self-knowledge that are the fruits of solitude and meditation.
I hope my family and friends would be there when I returned and would welcome the new being in me. I would bring with me the things I wrote for them while I was gone. I think a part of me would never come all the way back to the everyday world.
There is no doubt that this kind of renunciation is hard and even painful for us ordinary folks. We can dream of it, but we can’t do it. Those few who have the courage to do such a thing by choice in real life are people I greatly admire.