It seems a lot of people think they don’t have time to meditate. Life is simply ‘too busy’ to do something as unproductive as sitting and closing your eyes.

There’s an old Zen proverb that says ‘if you don’t have time to meditate for 20 minutes then you should meditate for 1 hour’.

Irony aside, there’s a lot of wisdom in this. Meditation is the perfect remedy to cope with the pressures of modern living. If we feel so overwhelmed and short of time that we can’t conceive of finding a small window to meditate, then we absolutely must make time.

Considering that there a 1440minutes in a day, surely we can find 20 minutes twice a day to invest in our practice. We sometimes find we spend more time thinking about how we should sit down and meditate, than we do actually meditating. Recognising the time lost in our tendency to procrastinate and how easily we are carried away with distractions (technology) shows us exactly where we can find the time to meditate.

We say we don’t have any time, when in fact, time is all we truly have. It’s how we choose to use it that makes the difference. So rather than making life a race to the finish line, why not choose to slow down a little and connect to life in the only place where it actually exists… here and now. In this simple choice we begin to live life, rather than think about it.