7
Arjun set a timer for 60 seconds. It didn’t change his day; it changed his days.
Arjun was always answering something—messages, meetings, the imagined urgency that hummed in his pocket. He set a timer for one quiet minute each morning and sat with his breath, counting to ten and returning to one whenever he noticed he’d wandered. The minute passed quickly but left a trace, a smoother edge to his reactions. Without trying, he ate slower, paused before replying, and began to notice birds he had lived with but never seen. The practice grew to three minutes, then five, but the shape of the change was made in that first small promise kept every day: a minute he owned before the hours owned him.
