1,440 Minutes in a Day and How to Fill Them

Last night I attended a lecture by my dear friend Bonnie Pitman, the Founder of the Do Something New (TM) Practice. She taught us many things: to look, to pay attention, to find the bliss of solitude. She reminded us that we have 1,440 minutes in a day.

Set a timer for sixty seconds and sit with me.

It's spacious, isn't it? Time feels so different when it is identified as time: a division of space (24 hours) into smaller spaces (60 minutes) and into the smallest spaces (60 seconds). Conscious intention makes sure we don't miss it: the human being on the elevator, the leaf that falls below the crepe myrtle, the glow of a slow sunrise.

I don't want to miss it. And the way to not miss it is to be with it. To say to time: sit with me in silence and give me a parentheses to breathe. Because otherwise I forget.

This is existence. We choose what we put into this parentheses: consciousness or unconsciousness.

And we have so many magnets pulling us away from being in the present: technology, movies-on-demand, email. We need the parentheses to remember.

I practice this intention by placing three minutes into the beginning of every meeting I lead. I learned this practice at the Festival of Faiths in Louisville, Kentucky. It takes something: an ability to stop one energy in the room and invite a new energy; a willingness to let go of what people might think; a worry they will look at their phones or use the time to prep for the meeting. It takes making a different commitment: to invite the self to stop and choose silence, reflection, to breathe and go inward.

So drop into Friday with me --and later on, in the middle of email or at the beginning of a meeting, take just three minutes and put them inside of a parentheses. Set your timer on your phone and follow the breath. You'll still have 1437 minutes to conquer the world, and chances are those three minutes will give you what you need to do it. 

9/11 And Other Etchings

We all have our stories: before 9/11 I remember my parents talking about where they were when Kennedy was shot: certain places on their university campuses. Now we have a new etching: the place we were, the way it felt, and the things we did in the moments after we saw things we never thought we would see in our lifetime.

I was living in Uptown: near Downtown Dallas. I didn't know that the choices I made in September 2001 would haunt me, likely forever. It can't be unseen. My memory of 9/11 is a relationship I should not have been in: the black sheep brother of a best friend: reckless, rebellious, ridiculous. That's where I was, or rather he was with me. We woke that morning to strong coffee and shock: quickly realizing the things that really mattered: being with the ones we loved. And that wasn't each other.

Awkward--both aspects of that fall morning in Dallas, when the planes stopped flying--both memories I would rather forget.

But I can't: they are tied together forever. This person left my house both immediately and permanently. At least I like to remember it that way. In his wake were two precious friendships-and they have never come back to me. The risk wasn't worth it. But for a few moments that morning, 9/11 has him in the picture: both of us standing in front of a big box television crying and word-less. We knew in that moment of truth on television, our fake relationship was over. He gathered up his things and left.

I couldn't go to work: the museum and parts of downtown were closed. I drove to church with a few hundred other people: we were all dressed for work. Hoping for normal. I sat in the Memorial Chapel at the Church of the Incarnation: looking at life, and death and choices.

Like so many of us, 9/11 had a connection point beyond the television for me. In 1998, three years prior, I lived for a summer in New York at 110 Liberty Street, just across the street from the World Trade Centers. I walked that morning path: past the Brooks Brothers that was the temporary morgue, I rode the trains into the same station, I spoke to the doormen, and the guy at the coffee stand. I knew the families who lived in the buildings with the glass windows blown out. I knew the rhythms too well.

In the church that day I prayed for all of them: the doormen, the coffee-seller, the church family at Trinity Wall Street, the family I lived with. I prayed they were all somewhere else in that moment: already at pre-school, off in the country, not quite at the door yet. I wanted a different outcome for all of us. I wanted all of us to be somewhere else in that moment. I still do.

And so we created new rhythms that day. We learned what it was like to walk on the Katy Trail without airplanes. We finally found our New York friends and told them we loved them.

I broke up with my boyfriend.

I created a different life: one with a little more purpose that it had on September 10th. Wisdom? Reality? Somewhere in between, but the good news, inside all of this bad news is that we came together as a nation and found a deeper kind of love: real love.