Praying as one whole person

You know the shape your prayers used to have. A few words at the edge of something else. A minute before stepping out the door, with half your attention already on the cigarette waiting at the end of it. There was a clock running underneath the words and both of you could hear it ticking. You were not faithless in those minutes. You meant what you managed to say. You were simply divided, and you had been divided for so long that it stopped registering as a problem and started feeling like the only way anyone prays.

Notice what has quietly become possible. There is no errand waiting at the end of the sentence now. Nothing is due, nothing is running out, nobody is counting the minutes but you. You can stay as long as you want to stay, and that is a genuinely new condition for a person like you. Prayer stops being something you squeeze into a gap between two other things and becomes a place you can actually stand still in. The words are the same. The person saying them is no longer negotiating with a countdown.

This is worth more than most of the health arguments put together. A divided person always comes to God with a corner of the hour promised somewhere else. He was never bothered by that. He took the divided prayers too, all of them, for years. But you were paying for it, the way any conversation costs you something and gives you almost nothing back when half of you is elsewhere in the room. Undivided attention is the one thing you cannot fake and cannot buy.

So give a few unhurried minutes today, on purpose, with nothing at all scheduled behind them. Not a long session. Five minutes with no exit planned is different in kind from an hour with one waiting. Sit down, say whatever is actually true about today, and then stay a little past the point where you would once have stood up and gone. That extra minute is the entire thing. Nobody will see it happen, and it will change the shape of your day anyway.