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.
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.
❤️
ReplyDelete