Hey Householder, how many minutes do you have?

Daily practices are often just a matter of minutes.  The yoga that most of us practice today comes to us because the yogis discovered a need to develop a system that combined meditation, movement, sense withdrawal, and breathing techniques into an efficient practice for regular people. They called these regular people "householders." Unlike hardcore yogis who lived in caves and devoted 10 hours a day to their practice, the householder had worldly obligations: family, jobs, a house to maintain.

Most of us are householders, which means that we need systems that can be practiced in terms of minutes, not swaths of hours. And most of us are householders when it comes to both our writing and our yoga practices. We have classes that need teaching, service commitments, etc., etc. Even though writing is often a priority in academic life, perhaps the main priority, it is not the only one.

And yet...With both our writing practice and our yoga practice, we often behave as though it is outrageous that we cannot retreat to our caves and do our practice for 8 hours a day, and when we can't, we say, I don't have enough time to do yoga; I don't have enough time to write.

But we are forgetting, we're on householder time, and the householder deserves to practice, too.  And we also forget that because the most of us live and work in the householding world, this practice is liable to come in parcels of minutes, not hours, each day.

This could seem like a bummer, but the world needs householders to run along its course. And rather than thinking of what we don't have--why oh why don't I live in a gorgeous cabin in the woods where I do nothing but my totally excellent writing practice and my totally brilliant writing all day?--we can think about what we nonetheless deserve to have as householders in this world: some minutes taken aside for our daily practice. Minutes that are very precious indeed.

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