You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while (Mark 6:31).
Leon Neyfakh has just published an article on the benefits of solitude in The Boston Globe. According to Neyfakh, there is an increasing body of research that suggests that spending time alone can be good for us. I guess that’s what writers/theologians/thinkers like Kierkegaard, Merton, Weil, Nouwen, Penn, Fox etc and their biblical forebears were trying to tell us all along!
Anyway, it’s an interesting article worth perusing:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/03/06/the_power_of_lonely/?page=1.