Small divisions of continuity, the minutes of the clock. Our lives are filled with them. They are how we measure our movements through space, through aging. Sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, 1440 minutes make a day, and over 10,000 minutes make a week. There are over half a million minutes in a year. A human being who lives for seventy-five years lives through almost 40 million units of sixty-second time. A person who lives to be one hundred gets over 52 million of them. Those are big numbers. They remind me that, for most of us, we have plenty of minutes in our lives. Although many of those minutes may be of limited quality, they are not, for an average person, of limited quantity. We seem to have plenty to spare.
So suppose we took one of those minutes, just one, and devoted it, just once a year, to a common goal. Suppose an entire state, or country, or even the planet identified just one minute per year to stop, pause, and reflect, pray, or breathe together at the same time. What might that experience be like?
You might be thinking that we already do this, on New Years Eve. Not really. Yes, we often count together each December 31st at 11:59pm but we do it in different time zones and we do it with different purpose. We are counting towards the next minute, a new year, when we count down, mechanically, mostly mindlessly, the terminal minute of last year, a final allotment of seconds as we transition, thankfully, often longingly, from one number on a calendar to the next. The concluding minute of most years is something to get through, something to be done with, rather than something to savor, something to embrace, something to be experienced – as one.
“Let’s take a moment of silence to … (you fill in the blank)”. Many of us have been asked to do this, at funerals and memorials, or in prayer services, or perhaps in civic and community meetings. We dutifully respond to such requests, often standing, relaxing our hands and minds, closing our eyes, bowing our heads, or maybe even turning our faces to the sky and our sun and the aspirations of our spirits. The silence that follows is often saturated with life. We hear the shuffling of feet, the sighing of breath, coughing, the cries of infants, the spaces between the noise of being and the desire of the human heart to be heard. I used to be uncomfortable when asked to do this at the beginning of large meetings or conferences. Was I being asked to pray? Why should I be asked to do that? Only when I learned to acknowledge the importance of intentional pause did I come to appreciate the power in the request to collectively listen, to be quiet with others purposefully, to sometimes remember or consider something together without any one human voice speaking. It is a very grounding experience. We can be loud, us humans. We shout too much. We tell each other what is wrong too much. We think we know so much that sometimes we talk, and we talk, and we talk without thinking, without listening, without remembering to simply and softly be.
Last summer, I attended a training for health leaders on professional fulfillment and wellbeing. It was during the June lull in the coronavirus pandemic, a window of weeks when we believed, mistakenly, that much of the COVID virus and its tragedy was behind us. Most of us in the room had not been physically present in such a setting with other health professionals in quite some time. There was a buzz associated with the return. There was a verbal acknowledgement of the buzz from the speaker’s podium when the meeting began. But there was not a opportunity for the depth of feeling beneath that palpable hum for us to take a shared breath. We were not offered the comforting cloak of a mutual moment of silence. The tragedy, the loss, the frustration, the grief so pervasive in the communities we respectively served was not mentioned. It was disorienting for me, even a bit destabilizing. I felt a distinct desire for a temporary standstill, a longing for connection to others through an opportunity to simply think, internally, about the preceding sixteenth months of life and history and to do so, externally, purposefully, with others.
Might we schedule such a time still?
Imagine that we are all given an opportunity, later this month or next, to stop, for just one minute, and be. Together. Pick a day and time, say next Saturday at noon. The time zone doesn’t matter. What does is the sense of collective intent, identity. Think of the sadness that others have felt, we might offer as guidance. Or think of the sadness you personally have felt. Try to pause from your busy lives and think that millions, perhaps even billions, of other people are doing the same. You only know a sliver of the people presently living on the face of our earth. Individually, you have encountered, loved, and lost an infinitesimal percent of the total number of people on this planet. But together, all of us, we have known and we still know all of these people. Everyone knows someone. The chain of knowing links us all. So let’s pause, be still, and be silent. Think about people or whatever power you want to think about. Think about people you love, miss, or want to honor and do so silently, without speaking, and with humility, open hearts, and whatever feelings that arise. For just one minute – only sixty seconds – think about someone or some power who represents or has represented goodness in your life. And know that, while you are doing this, everyone else you know, and everyone else you don’t know, is doing this also.
What common strength might we find in a single minute of shared silence?