Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

A boy, a stone and a Pond

 

 

A boy stood at the edge of a pond, choosing a stone.

Not the flattest one. Not the one that would skip farthest or make the biggest sound. He turned it over twice. He decided something private about it. Then he let it go.

Asked why that one. He shrugged. “It just felt right.”

He never watched where it landed. By the time the rings were spreading, he was already bent over, looking for the next one.

I have thought about that boy many times.

Because most of us do the opposite. We throw the stone and then we stand there, counting circles. We drop a word, a kindness, a hard conversation into the water, and we wait for the ripples to tell us whether it mattered. Did it reach the far shore? Did anyone see the splash? Was it enough?

Here is what I believe, and you may not agree with me. Everything we do is a spiritual act. Everything. There is no neutral surface on this pond. There is no throw that lands nowhere. Every word, every silence, every small decision made in a kitchen or a car or a hallway sends something outward, and that something touches lives we may never meet. We sort our days into what counts and what doesn’t. The water makes no such distinction. It receives everything.

And here is the strange part. We already know this. Something in us knows it before we act. In the half-second before the words leave, before the hand moves, something inside has already registered: this will land somewhere. On someone.

That knowing has a name. It is called intention.

Intention is the part of the throw no one else ever sees. The person on the far shore receives the ripple. The tone, the timing, the visible act. What they never receive is the inside of your hand at the moment of release. Why you did it. What you hoped. Whether the kindness was whole, or carrying a second, smaller motive underneath.

But unseen is not absent. The intention travels with the stone. It is stitched into the act the way the boy’s private decision was stitched into that particular stone. The pond never knew why he chose it. He knew. And somehow, that was enough to change the throw.

Sit with that for a moment, because it opens in two directions at once.

The first is freedom. If intention is real even when no one sees it, then the worth of what you do is not decided on the far bank. The kind act that went unnoticed lost nothing. The apology that was misread lost nothing. The love was in the release, not the reception. You can stop standing at the water’s edge, waiting for permission to call your throw worthwhile. It already was.

The second direction is harsher. If intention travels unseen, then all of it travels. The motive we thought we tucked inside a generous gesture does not stay hidden in any way that matters. It bends the throw. You have felt this from the other side. The gift that somehow asked something of you. The compliment with a hook in it. No one explained it. You just knew. Intention leaks. It always has.

Mystics have a word for the alternative. Purity of intention. Not purity as perfection. None of us throws a clean stone every time. Purity as singleness. One motive, not three. Doing the thing for its own sake. The mystics went further and said: for God alone. Which is another way of saying that when the heart is single, the outcome can be released the instant the stone leaves the hand. What happens next belongs to the water. It was never ours.

The boy will never know what his stones did. Ten thousand throws he never watched land. And something in him will stay light because of it. Not because the ripples didn’t matter. Because he trusted them to the water.

So do we. Or so we could.

Pause for Thought: Before your next word or act, don’t ask whether it will be seen. Ask what is actually in your hand.

This week, notice the half-second before you speak. That small interior moment when the intention forms. Don’t judge what you find there. Just notice it. Then throw the stone as cleanly as you can, and trust the rest to the One who receives every ripple, even the ones we never watch land.

Peace and all good, Michael

 

 

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Hand Off

The Hand-Off

There is a precise moment in a relay race where everything hangs in the balance. It isn’t the gun that starts the runners, and it isn’t the tape at the finish. It is the exchange zone — that short, marked stretch of track where two runners occupy the same space for a few strides, and a wooden baton passes from one hand to another.

Passed too early, the momentum stalls. Thrown carelessly, it drops, and the race is over before either runner realizes what happened. A clean hand-off requires the passer to match the receiver’s pace, to run alongside them for a moment before letting go, and to release the weight at exactly the right second — not before the other hand is ready, not after the moment has passed.

I have not run a real relay race since high school days. But I have dropped a baton more times than I can count, and every one of those drops happened at my kitchen table; not on a track.

The Baton We Carry

Think about the last time you offered a piece of advice nobody asked for. Shared a heavy insight with your spouse in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Dropped an opinion into a room that had been, until that moment, quiet. In each of those moments, you were holding a baton — an idea, an interpretation, a piece of truth you were carrying and someone else was not yet carrying.

The question worth asking is not whether the truth was true. It usually was. The question is:

How did you hand it off?

Too often, we don’t hand things off. We drop them off. We sometimes throw our insights the way you’d throw a stone across a yard — expecting the other person to catch it cleanly, regardless of how fast they were already running, regardless of how full their hands already were. We say what we came to say, exactly how we wanted to say it, and then we walk away, satisfied that we were honest. And being honest was enough.

The room tells the truth about what just happened, even when we don’t. A cloud descends. The other person is left fumbling — blindsided, judged, suddenly carrying a weight they didn’t agree to hold. The baton is on the ground, and somehow, it’s their fault for not catching it.

Reading the Weather

I learned this the slow way, which is to say I learned it by watching my own words land wrong more times than I’d like to admit. My instinct, especially with the people I love most, has always been to say the true thing quickly — as if speed were a form of honesty, as if the sooner I handed it over, the more it would count as care. It doesn’t. My wife Sally has taught me, gently and not so gently, that the timing of a truth is not a separate issue from the truth itself. It is part of it.

This is where Sacred Noticing does its quiet work. Before I open my hand, (to pass that baton) I have learned to notice — not the content of what I want to say, but the person standing in front of me. What is their weather right now? Are their hands already full? Have they just walked in from a long day, a hard call, a grief I don’t know about yet? A sacred hand-off begins before a single word is spoken. It begins with noticing and a pause that asks:

Is this person ready to receive what I am carrying?

That combination of noticing and pause changes everything downstream. It is the difference between speaking at someone and running alongside them for a few strides first.

The Open Palm

When the moment is actually right — and sometimes it is, sometimes the weather is clear and the hands are open — a clean hand-off feels almost nothing like a “dumping or throwing” I described earlier. It feels like a gift being offered rather than a verdict being delivered. You match their pace. You offer the thought softly, palm open rather than fist closed. And then — this is the hard part, the part I still have to practice — you let it go.

You do not micromanage how they hold it. They have it now. You do not require them to run the race the way you would run it, at your speed, toward your finish line. You offer what you were carrying, and you let them carry it forward in whatever way it needs to be carried. That release is not indifference. It is trust — the same trust a runner has to place in the stranger-shaped hands reaching back toward them mid-stride.

Notice. Pause. Respond. The same three movements that shape every act of Sacred Noticing shape the hand-off too. Notice their pace before you decide yours. Pause before the release, long enough to ask whether this is your moment or only your urgency. Respond by opening your hand rather than throwing your stone.

A Practice for the Week

The next time you feel the familiar pull to hand someone a sudden thought — an insight, a correction, a piece of wisdom you’re certain they need — try pausing for a single breath first. Look at the person actually in front of you, not the one in your head. Match their stride for a moment before you let go of anything.

You may find, as I so often do, that the truth you were carrying is still true a few minutes later. It usually is. What changes is not the baton. What changes is whether it lands in an open hand or on the ground between you.

A hand-off is not about how badly you need to let something go. It is about whether the person across from you is ready to hold it.


Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Weather You Bring

The Weather You Bring

A Spiritual Break Reflection

A few years ago, at a conference, a man came up to me and said, “You probably don’t remember me.”

He was right. I didn’t.

He had worked at my company, three levels removed in the organizational hierarchy, back when I still thought leadership was mostly about decisions. He told me that one afternoon, in a hallway, I had stopped and said to him: “I heard what you said in that meeting this morning. Don’t stop saying things like that.”

Then he told me what those two sentences had done. He had been planning to go quiet, he said. To keep his head down like everyone else. Instead, he kept speaking up, and speaking up became his career, and now he runs a company of his own, and he tells his people the same thing in hallways.

I have no memory of saying it. None.

Twelve words, spoken in passing by a man thinking about something else, carried for twenty years by a man who built part of his life on them.

That is the strange arithmetic of leadership. We assume our impact lives in the big things — the strategy, the reorganization, the decision we lost sleep over. Those matter. But they are often the smallest part of what we leave behind. The larger part is unrecorded. It is your face while you read email in the meeting. The sigh before you answer a question. Your pace in the hallway. Whose name you remember, and whose you don’t. The moment you looked up from your screen when someone came to your door — or the moment you didn’t.

Here is what nobody tells you when you take the role: the title is an amplifier. When you lead, people study you. They have to. Their days depend on your weather, so they become meteorologists of you. Your Tuesday mood becomes the building’s forecast. A passing comment from a peer is a comment; the same comment from you is a policy. You stopped being one voice in the room the day the room started waiting to hear yours.

Which means you are leaving a trace in every encounter, all day long, whether or not you intend one. You cannot opt out of impact. You can only opt out of noticing it.

I would like to tell you the man at the conference is the whole story. He isn’t. For every sentence that gets quoted back to me at a conference, there were others — the impatient ones, the distracted ones, the small dismissals I don’t remember either. Nobody comes up to you at a conference to return those. But they were carried too. They were carried just as far.

That is the part that could crush you, if you let it. I don’t think it should. I think it should slow you down.

Because the same reckoning that makes the careless sentence so heavy makes the kind one so unreasonably powerful. If twelve words in a hallway can hold for twenty years, then you are walking around all day with something enormous in your hands, and it costs almost nothing to use it well. A pause before you answer. A face that says the person in front of you is not an interruption. One sentence, noticed and given, on an ordinary afternoon.

You will not remember most of what you leave behind. That is not a flaw in the design. It may be the mercy in it — the trace does its work without asking you to watch.

But someone, somewhere, is still carrying a sentence of yours.

This is your spiritual footprint. You leave it everywhere — in every hallway, every meeting, every glance and every silence. You always have. 

 

This reflection is inspired by The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS  •  spiritualbreak.com

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Boat Without Oars

The Boat Without Oars

A Spiritual Break Reflection

In the year 891, three Irishmen washed ashore on the coast of Cornwall, England in a boat made of hide stretched over a wooden frame. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was not given to sentiment, thought the event strange enough to record. What made it strange was not that they had arrived. It was that they had set out, deliberately, without oars. When they were brought before the court of King Alfred and asked why, their answer entered history in a single sentence: they wished to be pilgrims for the love of God, and they cared not where.

I am the son of Irish parents, and I confess that when I first met this story, it did not feel like history. It felt like family. Because I recognized the move: the extravagant, slightly alarming gesture that turns out, on closer inspection, to be theology. Those three men were not being careless. They had simply decided, with their whole bodies, that God was a better navigator than they were — and then they built a boat that made the decision irreversible.

They were not alone. The early Celtic monks had a name for this: peregrinatio pro amore Dei — wandering for the love of God. It was pilgrimage with the destination removed. Columba left Ireland for Iona in c.563 not knowing what his mission would become; the island claimed him as much as he chose it. The Voyage of St. Brendan tells of monks who sailed wherever wind and current carried them, trusting the steering to Someone else. This was how mission and location were often discerned in that world. Not by strategy. By drift.

Now look at your own week. Count the oars.

The calendar is an oar. The GPS is an oar. The to-do list, the fitness tracker, the itinerary, the five-year plan — oars, every one. We are the most thoroughly rowed generation in human history. Even our leisure has an agenda now; we optimize our rest and measure our sleep. And if we are honest, even our prayer can become another form of rowing — twenty minutes, timer set, technique applied, progress quietly assessed. There is nothing wrong with oars. But a life that never ships them has made a decision about who is steering, and it is worth noticing what that decision is.

So here is a practice I have come to love, and one we now offer on retreat at San Damiano in the late afternoon, when the light goes gold on the hills. We call it a Drifting Prayer. The invitation is short enough to memorize: The Celtic monks used to set out to sea in small boats with no oars. They let the current decide. For the next while, the grounds are your current. There’s nowhere to get to and nothing to bring back. Walk, or don’t. If something finds you, let it.

You do not need a retreat center to pray it. You need a coracle — which is to say, a boundary. Thirty minutes. The park near your office. The road home taken slowly. A Saturday afternoon you refuse to schedule. The boundary is the only decision you make; it is the little boat that holds you. Then you ship the oars: leave the phone, drop the errand, release the outcome. If it helps, borrow the pilgrims’ own prayer of consent — Lead me; I care not where — which may be the most honest six words ever said to God.

And then you drift. You follow what gently draws you — a turn in the path, a bench, a birdsong, a doorway, a memory that rises unbidden. You steer only for safety. And when you catch yourself reaching for the oars again — planning tomorrow, evaluating the walk, quietly converting the hour into something productive — you notice, you smile, and you let the current have the boat back. That reach for the oars is not failure, by the way. It is the practice. Every time you release the handle, something in you learns a little more about trust.

Somewhere in the drift, something may arrest you. Stop there. You do not need to name it, photograph it, or turn it into a lesson. If something finds you, let it. And if nothing finds you — if the whole hour is just wind and footsteps and an ordinary sky — then the drifting itself was the prayer, and it was enough.

I want to say a particular word to those in a drifting season of life, because some of you did not choose your coracle. Retirement chose it. Recovery chose it. The empty house, the waiting room, the long stretch between what ended and whatever comes next. Our culture will tell you that because you are not doing anything, nothing is happening. The three men in the boat say otherwise. Being led is a form of prayer — perhaps the oldest one. And notice this, because it matters: the monks did not drift to relax. They drifted to be sent. Columba’s drift ended at Iona, and Iona changed the world. If you are in a season when the way forward is unclear, the drift is not the opposite of discernment. It is discernment, conducted at the speed of trust.

The other prayer forms will still be there when you come ashore — the chair, the sacred word, the Scriptures, the chapel. A Drifting Prayer replaces none of them. It simply consecrates the hours they cannot reach: the in-between ones, the unplanned ones, the ones we were about to waste by filling.

This week, then: one oarless hour. Choose your coracle. Say the six words. And let the current decide.

Where in your life are you still gripping the oars — and what might find you if, for one hour, you let the current decide?

Reflection Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Yellow Light

The Yellow Light

A Spiritual Break Reflection

This morning, washing hands at the sink, soap bubbles catch the light and turn into tiny rainbows. For just a moment, my hands slowed in the warm water. Not because I needed to stop and have a “home-made” spiritual experience, but because something lovely was happening right there in my kitchen sink.

It reminded me of traffic lights—specifically that yellow light that begs us from motion into stillness. Not the jarring red that demands we stop, but that gentle amber invitation: something’s shifting here.

I sometimes notice these yellow light moments scattered throughout my days like breadcrumbs. They’re not asking for dramatic responses or profound revelations. They’re simply there, quiet invitations to notice what’s already present.

Sometimes it’s the particular way morning light falls across the lobby at the retreat house, turning ordinary wood golden. My mind pauses mid-sentence, not because I must stop and appreciate beauty, but because beauty has already stopped me. The moment passes, I return to whatever I was supposed to be doing, but something has shifted—a small opening where grace slipped in.

Or it’s the sound of rain beginning while writing an email. That first gentle pattering doesn’t demand I abandon my work for contemplation. It simply offers itself, and if I happen to notice, the soundtrack of an afternoon changes from mental chatter to nature’s rhythm.

These moments seem to arrive most naturally at transitions. Walking from the house to the car, I may notice how the air feels different today. Shifting from one task to another, there’s often a brief pause where I remember I’m not just a person checking boxes but someone alive in this moment. Even breathing has these built-in yellow lights—that slight pause between inhale and exhale, where everything briefly suspends.

Last week, talking with my daughter, she said something that made her voice catch slightly. Such a small thing—anyone might miss it. But there it was, a yellow light moment. I found myself listening differently, not interrogating or fixing, just receiving what she was really saying beneath the words. The conversation meandered into places it wouldn’t have gone if I’d stayed in my usual efficient parent mode. She was happy to be talking with me, the words might be somewhat irrelevant.

I don’t think life is constantly signaling us to pay attention—that would be exhausting. But there do seem to be these natural pause points woven through our days, gentle as that amber light that says transition is happening, no rush.

The poet Rumi wrote about selling cleverness and buying bewilderment. Maybe these yellow lights are life’s way of offering that trade. For just a moment, we can let go of knowing exactly where we’re going and simply be present to where we are.

This isn’t about trying to notice everything or turn daily life into a spiritual practice. It’s more like discovering that ordinary moments have their own quiet wisdom if we happen to be available when they offer it. The way tea changes color as it steeps. How shadows move across the wall as the afternoon progresses. The peculiar and beautiful silence that overcomes when snowfall begins.

Some days, I’m moving too fast to notice any yellow lights at all. Other days, one small moment of recognition—a dog stretching in a patch of sun, the smell of coffee brewing, the feeling of soft socks on tired feet—creates a tiny opening. Not a door demanding I walk through, just a window showing me what’s here.

Awakening isn’t something we achieve through effort. It could be more like slowly recognizing what’s been glowing softly all along. The sacred is scattered throughout our hours, not as a test or a challenge, but as a quiet gift for anyone who happens to be looking when life gently signals: here’s something worth noticing, if you’d like.

Tomorrow morning, you might catch one of these moments. Or you might not. Either way, they’ll keep coming, gentle as light itself, marking the transitions between rushing and resting, doing and being, sleeping and waking up to what’s been here all along.

The yellow lights aren’t trying to stop us or make us more spiritual. They’re simply part of the landscape, faithful as breathing, available as morning. And sometimes, when we’re moving at just the right speed, we notice them. And something in us says oh, yes and slows down just enough to receive what’s being offered.

That’s all. That’s enough. That’s everything.

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS