Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

 

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

I did not go looking for this headline. It found me, the way the best material always does, wedged between two stories. A man in a silver cape, wearing an actual rubbish bin as a helmet, had just come second in a British parliamentary by-election. I read it twice. Then I read his manifesto, which is where this stopped being a funny headline and started to become a homily of sorts.

His name is Count Binface. He is, by his own account, an intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons, from the planet Sigma IX. He has stood for election against two sitting Prime Ministers and lost to both, stood for Mayor of London and lost that too, and on the thirteenth of August stood in Clacton against Nigel Farage (a well-known British politician) and lost again — this time with 9,455 votes to Farage’s 22,239. In electoral terms that is a drubbing. In every other term, nearly ten thousand people in one of the most fought-over patches of England looked at a man dressed as a household waste container and decided he had the better idea.

Reading the Manifesto Out Loud, With a Straight Face

Try it sometime. Here is an actual, documented Count Binface policy platform: cap the price of a croissant at £1.10. (Around $1.45) Cap a 99 ice cream at 99 pence. Cap a kebab at £2. Tie every government minister’s salary to a nurse’s salary for the next hundred years. Strip MPs of their subsidized Parliament-canteen food and drink. Build at least one affordable house.

Read that last one again. Not a thousand houses. Not a bold ten-year plan with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. At least one. He has said, in interviews, with a completely straight face, that he is confident he can hit that target, if not surpass it. It is the single strangest housing policy in modern British politics, and it is also, I would argue, the most honest one on offer — because it does not pretend to be more than it is.

Compassion, Filed Under Comedy

Binface has pledged to hand over the royal palaces — except the one the King still needs — and the seized homes of Russian oligarchs to people who currently have nowhere to sleep. Whatever surplus his campaigns raise, he sends to Shelter, the housing charity, rather than keeping it. This is a joke candidate quietly outperforming a great many non-joke candidates on the single question that most defines whether a society is caring for the people at its edges.

I am not going to stand here and tell you a man in a bin helmet is doing Franciscan charity. But I will say that the instinct underneath the joke, house the person who has no house, and don’t make a production of your own generosity while you do it, is the same instinct that has animated every genuinely compassionate movement in Christian history. Including the one that started with a rich man’s son giving away his father’s cloth in a piazza. (St Francis of Assisi). Count Binface just tells the joke first so the compassion can sneak in the side door while everyone is still laughing.

Humility Is Also a Policy Position

Notice what almost no other politician does: Count Binface makes fun of himself before anyone else gets the chance. He runs as a joke, campaigns as a joke, and loses as a joke, on purpose, every single time. There is no spin team explaining why second place was actually a victory. There is no dignified photograph pretending the silver bin is a crown. Self-deprecation is not a small trick. It is the discipline of refusing to think more of yourself than the moment warrants — which happens to be a fairly good working definition of humility, and a startlingly rare quality in the one wearing a suit and standing at a podium.

Affordability as a Form of Care

The croissant cap gets the headline but pause on what it is actually about. A price cap on small daily pleasures — coffee-shop pastries, ice cream from a van, a kebab on the way home — is a joke wrapped around a real observation: that the cost of ordinary life has crept up on people faster than their wages have, and nobody in a blue suit wants to say so plainly, because plainly is not how you get re-elected. Binface says it in the shape of a pastry, and the room laughs, and then the room goes quiet for a second, because everyone in it has felt that exact squeeze at the check-out.

Tying ministers’ pay to nurses’ pay works the same way. It is a punchline built on a real question: whose labor do we actually value, and does our economy tell the truth about it? A hundred years is an absurd timeframe on purpose. The absurdity is the delivery mechanism. The question underneath it is not absurd at all.

Care for Each Other, One Ridiculous Line Item at a Time

Strip out the space warrior and the Recyclons, and what is left is a platform obsessed, almost embarrassingly, with whether ordinary people are being looked after — housed, fed, paid fairly, protected from a cost of living that keeps rising faster than anyone’s patience. That is not a Franciscan biography. It is a Franciscan instinct: care for the person in front of you, be honest about what you actually have to give, and don’t dress up your own importance while you’re giving it.

A Tale of One City

Clacton will forget the vote count by Christmas. It will remember the bin. Not because the bin was holy — I want to be clear, nobody is canonizing a man from planet Sigma IX — but because the bin got people to take seriously, for one afternoon, what the man in the blue suit could not get them to take seriously. That is not sainthood. That is just a good aim.

Sometimes the truest way to be taken seriously is to stop asking to be taken seriously.

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

Don’t Slouch

I read something recently I could not let go.

The actress Hannah Waddingham (you may know her as the formidable Rebecca on Ted Lasso) spent years of her early career being turned away from roles for one reason only: she was too tall. Producers wanted her, and then didn’t, because she stood taller than the men they’d already cast. For a long stretch of her life, she found herself instinctively pulling inward, rounding her shoulders, making herself smaller in the room, so that no one else would have to feel small beside her.

Her advice, looking back on those years, came down to two words.

Don’t slouch.

Not just physically. She means it the way your soul means it. Don’t slouch emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Don’t dim your light because your presence is inconveniently large for someone else’s comfort. Don’t fold yourself down to fit into a room that was never built to hold the whole of you.

Let us sit with that for a moment, because I think most of us know exactly what she’s talking about, even if none of us have ever been told we were too tall for a part.

We’ve all slouched. Not in our posture but in our silence. The comment we didn’t make. The boundary we didn’t hold. The truth we watered down until it was polite enough not to cost us anything. We told ourselves we were being humble, or patient, or gracious. Sometimes we were. But sometimes, being honest, we were just afraid. Afraid of the room. Afraid of what our full height might make someone else feel.

Here’s the part I keep circling back to: Waddingham names whose discomfort she was managing. Not her own limitation; someone else’s inferiority complex. She was shrinking herself to manage a feeling that belonged to another person, not to her. And I wonder how much of our own slouching is exactly that. We are not actually too much. We have simply agreed, quietly and over many years, to be shaped by what makes other people comfortable rather than by what we were made for.

That is not humility. That is hiding. And you cannot hide from yourself, even when you’ve gotten remarkably good at hiding from everyone else.

I think about this in terms I’ve come to trust: notice, pause, respond. Most of us are excellent at the noticing. We feel the moment arrive — the meeting where we should have spoken, the relationship where we should have said no more of that, the room where our particular gift was needed and we knew it. We notice. And then, in the pause, instead of asking what wants to move through us, we ask what will keep the peace. We respond from management instead of from the soul. That’s the slouch. It isn’t cowardice, exactly — it’s a kind of premature surrender, done so quietly we don’t even notice we’ve done it. We didn’t respond from truth or love.

Do you ever regret it? I do. Not always the big things; sometimes it’s a small conversation, a word I swallowed, a moment I let pass because speaking would have cost me something I wasn’t ready to pay. And here is what I’ve come to understand about those moments: whether you speak or stay silent, you leave a trace. There is no neutral option. Your slouch is as much a footprint as your standing tall would have been, but it just isn’t the one you meant to leave.

This is where freewill and freedom actually live. Not in the certainty that others will understand you, or agree with you, or even notice what it cost you to say the thing. They might not. Waddingham didn’t get every part back. Some doors stayed closed. But she stopped shrinking to be chosen by rooms that required her to be less than she was. That is the whole point: not winning the room, but refusing to disappear inside it.

You have been given a will that is genuinely free. Not free to control outcomes- none of us have that; but free to choose, in this pause, whether you rise to your full height or fold yourself away again. Your soul already knows which one it’s asking for. It usually does.

So here’s the question worth carrying with you today, into whatever room you’re about to walk into: What have you been slouching to avoid? And what would it cost you, really cost you, to simply stand at your full height and let the room feel whatever it’s going to feel?

Don’t slouch. Leave the footprint you actually came here to leave.

 

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

 

 

References

Soares, Isabella. “Quote of the Day by Hannah Waddingham: ‘I Don’t Want Anyone to Ever Think That They’ve Got the Measure of Me…'” TVLine, August 8, 2026. https://www.tvline.com/2232748/quote-of-the-day-hannah-waddingham-trying-new-things/.

“Hannah Waddingham Says She Lost Out on Acting Roles Due to Her Height.” AOL, August 2026. https://www.aol.com/articles/hannah-waddingham-says-she-lost-153336000.html.

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