Praying every day

I grew up praying 5 times a day. I started at the age of 9 or so until I was around 24. This adds up to 25,550 or more prayers.

I found it inconvenient. So I stopped. Now I find myself yearning to pray again. Not because I should, but because something in me wants to. This surprises me that after years of freedom from religious obligation, the impulse returns. What I appreciate about praying is this idea of continuously reinforcing spirituality and maintaining a connection with something higher and greater throughout the day. These mini prayers never let me get lost in the practical and material world. There is always a gentle wake-up call stopping me from myself and from the world.

But the call has changed. I don't want to pray five times daily. I never found myself in some of those prayer times (which include the afternoon). I don't think of the afternoon as a spiritual time. No great poet has ever written a great poem in the afternoon. This is a fact; come challenge me on it. I find myself active and chasing the world in the afternoon. Anyways, enough about the afternoon.

The body has its own wisdom about when to pay attention. And for me, I think this is sunrise and sunset. That's when I'll pray twice a day. I always had a sense of the importance of sunrise for me. I value waking up during sunrise. It impact my mood. And now I'm beginning to learn the role of sunsets.

Praying with the sun's clock returns me to the fact that I am, despite appearances, still an animal on a planet spinning through space. I want to join birds that fly with sunrise and flowers that fold with sunset. In this opening and folding, expansion and rest, I recognize something truer than the artificial urgencies that usually govern my days. Things are just not that serious when you are a bird or a flower.

Another reason: Our days have become so uncertain, the world so overwhelming in its complexity and chaos. And I'm just a helpless poor mortal being. So I can get scared. But sunrise and sunset are profoundly reassuring. They arrive when promised, indifferent to human crisis. They are larger and more reliable than our anxieties. They are trustworthy.

If I were the queen of the world (which I'm sadly not), I would mandate a worldwide break every sunrise and sunset.

How strange that something so magnificent happens every single day. Somehow, this 4.6 billion-year-old star finds my tiny window twice each day. What are my 35 years against such age? Yet we make eye contact across 93 million miles.