Day by day, Hour by Hour

Recently I spent a week at a monastery. I didn’t interact a lot with the monks—it’s a cloistered community, and its members don’t often come to the guesthouse area where I  stayed. I saw them at church seven times a day; otherwise I was mostly alone, either walking the grounds or in my room reading or praying.

Reading, mostly. I struggled to pray. I have much stronger habits of prayer with others than alone. I did pray more than usual, and I tried out some contemplative practices mostly new to me. It was predictably hard, however, to quiet my mind in such a short time, much less to cultivate new prayer practices. So I read.

Where I did feel a real shift in consciousness was in my sense of time. After a day or two there my watch pretty much stayed in a drawer, and I never really knew or cared what time it was.