One Minute at the Window Before the Day
Sixty seconds of looking out before the looking-in begins.
Most mornings I go to the window before I go anywhere else. Not to open it, usually, and not to check the weather in any practical sense, though I will absorb the weather anyway. I go simply to stand there for a minute and look out at a world that has been getting on perfectly well without me all night.
It is the smallest of rituals, barely a ritual at all, and yet it has become the hinge on which the morning turns. One minute at the glass before the day begins its negotiations.
The world before you joined it
What strikes me, every time, is how much has already happened. The light has shifted. A bird is working a hedge with great seriousness. Someone two gardens over has hung washing out, or taken it in, and a cat is conducting business along a wall. None of it was waiting for me. The morning was fully under way before I arrived to witness it, and there is something steadying in that, a reminder that the day is not mine to run, only to join.
For one minute I am a spectator rather than a participant. I have no role out there. I cannot answer the bird's email or rearrange the clouds. I can only watch, and watching, properly, is a thing we have nearly forgotten how to do.
A minute is enough
It has to be brief or it does not happen. A minute is honest; a minute fits inside the most rushed of mornings. I am not asking myself to meditate or to feel anything in particular. I am asking only to look, with both eyes, at one ordinary view, for sixty unhurried seconds.
The minute at the window is not time taken from the day. It is the day, met before it can be managed.
The view need not be lovely. Mine includes a wheelie bin and a stretch of pebbledash that no one would call picturesque. But the light falls on the pebbledash differently each day, and the bin, I have noticed, casts a longer shadow as the year turns. The window does not need to show you beauty. It only needs to show you that something is happening, out there, today, that is not you.
The looking-in can wait
After the minute, the looking-in begins. The phone, the lists, the small interior weather of plans and worries. All of it will arrive whether I am ready or not. But for one minute I have looked outward first, and that order seems to matter. It puts the self in its proper proportion, somewhere smaller than the sky.
So I keep going to the window. It costs nothing and asks nothing and gives back a strange amount for its size. A minute of looking out, before the long day of looking in. The world will be there, getting on without you. It is rather good company, if you let it be.