Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

“You Can’t Do That”

“You Can’t Do That”

 

Four words. Sometimes only three.

They arrive in a corridor, or across a kitchen table, or in the middle of a conversation the other person will not remember having. They take about a second and a half to say. And whoever says them usually isn’t being cruel — they are being realistic, helpful, or simply thinking out loud about a life that isn’t theirs. Then they go home and forget it entirely.

You don’t.

Some years ago at a conference, a man I did not recognize came up to me and said, “You probably don’t remember me.” He was right. I didn’t. He had worked at my company years before, several levels below me, and he told me that one afternoon I had stopped him in a hallway and said: “I heard what you said in that meeting this morning. Don’t stop saying things like that.” He had been planning to go quiet, he said. To keep his head down. Instead, he kept speaking up, and speaking up became his career, and now he runs a company of his own.

I have no memory of saying it. None. Twelve words, spoken in passing by a man thinking about something else entirely, carried for twenty years by a man who built part of his life on them.

That is the strange arithmetic of a sentence: it costs almost nothing to say, and it can be carried for decades. And here is the harder half of it, the half I did not want to look at. The arithmetic runs in both directions. For every sentence handed back to me at a conference, there were others — the impatient ones, the dismissive ones, the ones I don’t remember either. Nobody comes up to you at a conference to return those. But they were received. Somewhere, they are still being carried.

The Two Obedient Responses

Broadly, there are two things we do with “you can’t do that,” and which one we choose depends almost entirely on what kind of day we’re having when it arrives.

If it lands on a strong day, we fight it. We take the sentence as a commission. We spend years, sometimes decades, assembling the evidence — the degree, the title, the finished manuscript, the thing we can finally set down on the table and say, there. And it works. The evidence is real. Nobody can take it from us.

If it lands on a thin day — and most of us have more thin days than we admit — we do something quieter. We don’t argue. We agree. Not out loud; agreement of this kind rarely needs words. We simply stop moving in that direction. We don’t apply. We don’t send it. We let the idea get busy, then old. And because we never actually tried, we never actually failed, which is the whole appeal of it. Declining to begin feels so much less like defeat than beginning and falling short. The sentence turns out to be true, and we are the ones who made it true, and we never quite notice we have done it.

Here is the part that took me a long time to see. Those two responses look like opposites. They are not. The person who never tried and the person who spent thirty years proving them wrong are both taking instruction from the same voice. One obeyed it. One defied it. Neither was free of it. A life organized around answering a sentence is still a life that sentence organized. The trophy on the shelf and the empty space on the shelf are addressed to the same person.

A Guess Wearing the Costume of Certainty

Think about what is happening when someone tells you what you are not capable of. They are standing outside a door, reading a label they invented, describing a room they have never once been inside.

That is all a judgment like this can ever be — a guess wearing the costume of certainty. The person offering it may be experienced. They may be older. They may even be describing something accurately: the version of you they have met, on the days they met you. What they cannot be is authoritative, because nobody has entered that room yet. Not them. And, on the day they say it, not you either.

Where the Sentence Lives Now

The difficulty is that after long enough, the sentence is no longer out there in the corridor. We have given it a room in the house.

Sixteen hundred years ago, a group of men and women went out to live alone in the Egyptian desert. We call them the desert fathers and mothers, and although the arrangement sounds eccentric, what they were doing was not. Stripped of distraction, they spent years watching how their own minds actually behaved — which makes them, in a real sense, the first careful students of the interior life.

One of them, a monk named Evagrius, noticed something that anyone who has lain awake at three in the morning will recognize. Certain thoughts don’t simply appear at random. They arrive along a track — the groove worn by every previous arrival of that same thought. The more often a thought has come, the more easily it comes again, and the less it feels like a visitor and the more it feels like a resident.

That is exactly what happens to “you can’t do that.” Somebody else said it once. Now it arrives in our own voice, on schedule, certain of its welcome, wearing clothes we recognize. And because it sounds like us, we stop experiencing it as somebody’s opinion. We experience it as a fact about ourselves. Nobody argues with a fact.

What those desert watchers understood — and it may be the most practical thing that tradition ever handed us — is that the groove is not the self. The thought is not the thinker. You did not choose the first arrival. You were not, at fourteen or twenty-two or whenever it happened, in any position to choose what came next.

But you are here now, with a view you did not always have.

The Third Response

So, what do we do, if fighting and folding are both forms of obedience?

Notice. Pause. Respond.

Notice it arriving — and notice which version has come, the one that makes you shrink or the one that makes you swing. Pause long enough that the groove does not run. Then respond, and not with yes I can, because that is still an argument conducted in someone else’s courtroom, and it still concedes that the matter is theirs to rule on.

Respond instead with something quieter and far more radical: “that was never yours to say”. This is not about the verdict. It is about jurisdiction.

The Square in Assisi

There is a scene from eight hundred years ago that shows this better than anything I could invent, and it needs no religious background at all to land — only the fact that it happened in public, in front of the whole town.

Before he was Saint Francis of Assisi, he was Francesco Bernardone, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant in a hill town in Italy. His father, Pietro, had plans for him. Francis was to inherit the business, marry well, and take his place among the respectable men of the town. That was the sentence written over his life long before anyone said it out loud: you are a merchant’s son, and a merchant is what you will be.

Francis had other ideas, and they looked, to his father, like a young man throwing his life away. He gave the family’s money and goods to the poor. He spent time with lepers — people with a disfiguring illness who were put outside the town walls and treated as untouchable, the last company a rising young merchant should keep. He spent his days repairing a crumbling chapel nobody had cared about in years. To Pietro, none of this was a calling. It was simply his son’s refusal to accept an accurate description of himself.

So, in 1206, Pietro did what a furious father with means could do: he hauled his son before the bishop in the town square to demand his money back — and, though he would not have put it this way, his son back. The bishop was the local church authority, and in a town like Assisi that made him the natural judge of a family dispute that had become a public scandal. A crowd gathered. Everyone knew everyone.

Francis did not argue. He did not defend his choices, produce evidence, or stay to win. He went into the bishop’s house, took off everything he was wearing, came back out, folded the clothes with some care, and laid them at his father’s feet.

It was not a tantrum. It was a withdrawal of jurisdiction. You may keep the description. It no longer applies to me.

And notice what happened next, because this is the part we always forget. He did not stand there exposed for long. The bishop, who was weeping by this point, stepped forward and wrapped him in his own cloak. What Francis set down was his; what he received back was borrowed. Which is, it turns out, the whole economy — we rarely get to see what is waiting to clothe us until we have actually put down what we were wearing.

You do not have to go back eight centuries to find the same movement. Hannah Waddingham, the actress many people know as Rebecca from the Ted Lasso series, spent years of her early career being turned away from parts for one reason: she was too tall. Producers wanted her, then didn’t, because she stood taller than the men already cast. For a long period she found herself rounding her shoulders, making herself smaller in the room. Her advice, looking back, came down to two words: “Don’t slouch.” She did not get every part back. Some doors closed and stayed closed. What changed is that she stopped folding herself down to be chosen by rooms that required her to be less. That is not winning the room. That is refusing to disappear inside it. It may be the only victory actually on offer, and it is enough.

The Sentence in Our Own Mouths

One last thing, and then I will leave you with it. We are not only on the receiving end of this. Somewhere this week, one of us will be the person in the corridor.

We rarely say you can’t outright. We are far too well brought up for that. We say that’s ambitious. We say “Are you sure, at your age?” We say “I just don’t want you to be disappointed” — which may be the most efficient small sentence in the language, because it sounds like love and functions like a lock. And then we go home and forget we said it.

They won’t. Twelve words can hold for twenty years. That is a lot to carry around in your hands all day, and it costs almost nothing to use well.

The Wisdom to Carry

Freedom does not arrive when you finally win the argument. It arrives when the argument ends, because you have stopped recognizing the court. Grace rarely knocks on doors we have already labeled closed — but it has never once been stopped by a door somebody else labeled for us.

 

Which sentence has been arriving longest in your own voice that began in someone else’s? And what would it cost you, today, to stand at your full height and let the room feel whatever it is going to feel?

Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS

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The Lone Piper

The Lone Piper

On September 11th, 2002, I sat preparing my slides and notes at Softworld2002, a North American software conference in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It was the first anniversary of the attacks. I was scheduled to give the first presentation, and my time slot fell just after the hour when, a year earlier, the planes had struck the Twin Towers in New York.

Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th, 2001. What returns to me each year, though, is not only that terrible day, but that first remembrance of it, a year later, in a conference hall far from New York. It has taught me something about how our remembrances find their way into the rest of our lives, or fail to.

My topic was business-to-business e-commerce, the subject of my first book. It was new and fertile ground in the software industry, and I expected it to be of real interest to the people in that room. Shortly before I began, the organizer told me there would be a moment of silence. I swallowed hard. I knew the morning would be difficult, but I did not expect what happened next.

The lights dimmed, and a lone piper walked onto the stage. He stood for a few moments, gathering himself, and then began the saddest tune I have ever heard. He probably played for no more than five minutes, but it seemed an eternity. The silence before his first note had already drawn us together, and the music carried every one of us into sadness, and into unity. It was a communal prayer without words, and his ceremonial dress gave it the feel of a liturgy.

His dreadful, beautiful sound seemed to come not only from his pipes but from all of us, a voice with no need for words. Sadness, regret, helplessness, frustration, and love filled that large conference space. And this was happening in Canada, on an island far from New York, among people drawn from across North America. The grief did not stop at any border. It was a spiritual atmosphere no one would have expected at such a “secular” event.

I watched the last glimpse of the white spats over his shoes disappear from the stage, and I felt strangely lost, caught between two worlds. How could I possibly move from that silence to a talk about online commerce?

After what seemed like an age, I walked to the podium. The lights were still dim. Then my first slide appeared on the screen, and the space around me lit up. I think I stumbled out a few unprepared remarks about the solemnity of what we had just shared, and they only made the turn to eBay and Amazon feel more incongruous.

I made my way through the presentation as best I could. The enormous changes the Internet was bringing to commerce, and all the automation tools that came with them, suddenly seemed beside the point. What was truly present in that hall was the human experience of being together, revisiting pain and tragedy with compassion. It did not need to be interrupted. And I, with my slides, was the interruption.

Most of us know some version of that moment. We step out of a hospital room, a funeral, or a quiet hour of prayer, and find ourselves back among emails, errands, and meetings. The two worlds seem as though they cannot belong together. Yet everyone in that hall had to return to their work that day, and I have come to believe the grace was not in leaving the silence behind, but in carrying some of it with us.

Every September 11th, I think of that lone piper and that conference hall, filled for a few precious minutes with shared compassion and communion. Those moments are a grace. They reveal what is already waiting in our hearts: a unity that tragedy uncovers but does not create. We do not have to wait for an overwhelming event to set it free. We can carry it into the ordinary rooms of our lives, even the ones where the lights have come back up, and the slides are already showing.

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham www.spiritualbreak.com

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Leash by the Door

The Leash by the Door

I could not put the leash away.

Everything else I managed. The bowl went into a cupboard. The collar went into a drawer, which is where these things go, apparently, when you cannot bear to throw them out and cannot bear to look at them either. But the leash stayed on its hook by the door for a long time after Flame died, and I walked past it every day, and I did not touch it.

What undoes you is not the grand thought. It’s the particular place on the floor that catches the afternoon sun, where nobody lies anymore. It’s the sound your ears go on listening for weeks after there is nothing left to make it. I sat down eventually to write a prayer for her, thinking it would be a small thing. It was not a small thing.

What Flame Left

I have written before about the Spiritual Footprint — the mark our lives leave on other people, the thing we carry out of the room after we have gone. I have written about it almost entirely in terms of humans. Our words, our tone, our patience or the lack of it. The gap between who we believe ourselves to be and what others actually experience from us.

I had not thought carefully about the fact that a dog leaves one too. And when you look at it directly, something uncomfortable becomes clear. The animal’s footprint might be cleaner than ours. (Metaphorically, that is; dogs do leave real footprints!)

Here is why. Most of what makes the human Spiritual Footprint difficult is the distance between intention and effect. I meant well. I was tired. I had my reasons. All true, and none of it reaches the other person, who received only what actually arrived. That gap is where most of our spiritual work lives.

Flame had no gap.

She was not managing an impression. She had no strategy, no reputation to protect, no version of herself she was hoping you would believe. She did not measure my failures or keep an account of my absences or love me less on the days I deserved less. She met me at the door as though I had been gone a hundred years, when in fact I had been at the dentist for two hours.

She left behind exactly what she was. And what she was, was glad I came back.

Why It Hurts This Much

People are sometimes embarrassed by how hard they grieve an animal. They say it apologetically. I know it’s just a dog. They will grieve a pet more openly than they grieved an uncle, and then feel obscurely guilty about it.

I don’t think there is anything to apologize for, and I think the reason is worth naming.

For many of us, that animal was the one relationship in which our own footprint did not have to be managed. She did not need us to be interesting. She had no opinion about our career. She was not tracking whether we had become the person we said we would become. We could come home defeated and be received without assessment — and for a great many people, that is the only place in their entire life where that happens.

We are not grieving a pet. We are grieving the one witness who never once required us to explain ourselves.

That is not a small thing, and it deserves better than “it’s just a dog.”

St. Francis Saw This First

Francis wrote the Canticle of the Creatures near the end of his life, mostly blind, in considerable pain, in a small, dark hut. He was not out on a hillside feeling pleasantly moved by nature. He was in trouble, and from inside that trouble he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister, and he meant it in the plain sense — not as a poetic flourish, but as a family claim.

That is the part people miss. Brother Sun and Sister Water are not decoration. They are a statement that the created world is not scenery for the human drama. It is kin. And a Franciscan does not have to squint to see why the household dog belongs on that list. She is not a possession, not an accessory to our life. She is a creature, made by the same hand, carrying the same signature.

There is a line in the Canticle about Brother Fire, whom Francis praised as beautiful and playful and robust and strong. I did not name my dog with the Canticle in mind. I named her Flame because of her coat. It was years before I noticed that Francis had already written her description, eight hundred years early, and got it exactly right.

This is why, every year around the fourth of October, we take the blessing outdoors.

It has to be outdoors, and not only for the obvious reasons. Dogs bark straight through the prayers. Leashes braid themselves together while their owners pretend not to notice. Somebody’s cat sits in a carrier at the far end of the lawn, refusing, on principle, to look at anyone. A child arrives holding a hamster the way you would carry the Blessed Sacrament, and someone else has brought a goldfish in a bowl of cloudy water and is holding it up with enormous seriousness. No homily survives it.

And it is entirely, unembarrassedly right; because for one morning, under the open sky where the Canticle was born, we stop pretending that the sacred begins where the animals leave off.

The Prayer

Here is what I finally wrote for her. I offer it in case someone reading this needs it. You may put your own animal’s name where hers is.

Lord God, Most High, All-powerful, All-good —

Praised be you through Brother Sun,

who warmed the place on the floor where Flame used to lie,

and through Sister Moon, who kept watch with us

through the last of the long nights.

We come to this threshold carrying small things:

a collar, a bowl, a leash by the door,

the sound our ears still listen for

and no longer hear.

Praised be you, Lord, for the creatures.

Francis called them brother and sister

and meant it plainly, without embarrassment —

Brother Wolf, who was hungry and not evil,

Sister Lark, who sang the day open,

the fish returned to the water,

the animals who came to him

because he did not come to them armed.

Praised be you through Brother Fire,

beautiful and playful and robust and strong,

whose name she carried without ever being told,

and whose warmth she left in the rooms she passed through.

You gave us a companion who never once

asked us to be more than we were.

Who did not measure our failures,

or keep an account of our absences,

or love us less on the days we deserved less.

Who met us at the door

as though we had been gone a hundred years,

and taught us, without a single word,

the whole grammar of welcome.

Praised be you through Sister Water, who quenches her thirst.

Through Mother Earth, who receives what she has given

and asks nothing for the keeping.

Through Sister Bodily Death, whom Francis blessed

and did not fear —

for she came gently to Flame, and we were allowed to be present,

and love was the last thing in the room.

We do not ask you to explain this.

We ask only that you receive Flame back

into the same creation that made her,

your first and still-speaking language,

where nothing you have loved is ever wasted

and nothing you have made is ever lost to you.

And send us out again into that creation

carrying what she placed in us

before we had a name for it:

her patience, her gladness, her uncomplicated presence,

her footprint on the quiet floor of our lives.

May what we held in our hands

be held now in our living.

Through Christ, who is the mirror and the light,

the bread and the dawn,

the space between and the One who fills it.

Amen.

What She Was Teaching

People ask me whether their animals are in heaven. I am not going to pretend to have an answer I do not. What I will say is that the Franciscan instinct runs entirely against the idea that God makes something, loves it, and then discards it — and that instinct is older and steadier than my opinion.

But there is something closer to hand that I am sure of.

Whatever Flame was doing all those years, she was demonstrating the practice in front of me daily and for free. She noticed. She paused at the door. She responded — always with her whole body, never with a calculation. And she did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for as long as she had.

Notice. Pause. Respond. And then … Repeat.

Long before I ever had language for Sacred Noticing, it was being practiced in my house by a creature who could not spell.

So when you bring your animal out to be blessed this October, or when you stand at the memorial for one who has already gone — do not apologize for the size of your feeling. You are not being sentimental. You are recognizing kin. And you are grieving a creature who did, effortlessly and without a single thought about it, the thing you and I spend our whole lives trying to learn.

Flame never once wondered what she was leaving behind. That is precisely how she left so much.

Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

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

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

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Have I Labeled Myself Into a Corner?

Have I Labeled Myself Into a Corner?

For many years, I introduced myself, quietly and without much thought, as the practical one. The businessman who happened to go on retreats. Not really a writer. Not a contemplative. Just someone who liked a good agenda and a well-run meeting, and who prayed on the side, the way you might keep a hobby in the garage.

I did not choose that label out of malice. It fit, or seemed to, for a long time. It explained why I was good in a boardroom and quiet in a chapel. It gave people a tidy place to put me, and it gave me a tidy place to put myself. The trouble is that a label, once it fits, starts doing something a description was never meant to do. It stops describing you and starts deciding what is allowed to happen to you next.

The Comfort of a Good Corner

There is real comfort in a label, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Naming our patterns is not a small thing. Knowing that we are the anxious one, the peacemaker, the fixer, the introvert, the practical one, gives us a vocabulary for our own weather. It can be the beginning of real self-knowledge, and I have watched it help people enormously, myself included.

But a corner is still a corner, even when we built it ourselves and even when it is comfortable. The danger is not in noticing the pattern. The danger is in mistaking the pattern for the whole room. “I am the practical one” quietly becomes “I am not the kind of person who writes.” “I am not a natural leader” becomes “I do not get to try.” We reach for the label to explain ourselves, and somewhere along the way the label stops explaining and starts deciding.

The Ones We Hand Ourselves

We are quick to notice when someone else tries to label us, and quicker still to push back. Don’t put me in a box. You don’t know me well enough to say that. We defend the border of ourselves fiercely against other people’s descriptions.

We are far less vigilant about the labels we hand ourselves. I am too old for that now. I have never been the creative type. That is simply not who I am. These arrive so quietly, and so early, that by the time they are limiting us they no longer feel like a decision at all. They feel like a fact. Nobody argues with a fact.

I spent years believing, as a fact rather than a habit, that I was not the kind of person who put words on a page for others to read. It took a very patient nudge — first toward a journal nobody else would see, then toward a reflection I was too embarrassed to send, then toward this very practice you are reading right now — before I noticed the label might have simply been wrong. Not wrong the way an error is wrong. Wrong the way a coat two sizes too small is wrong. It had fit once. It no longer did. I had just kept wearing it.

Opening the Door Without a Label On It

Sacred Noticing asks something different here, and it is not what most self-improvement asks. It does not ask you to find a better label. It asks you to notice the moment you reach for one, and pause before you let it close a door.

Somewhere in the hallway of your life there is a door with no label on it. Not the door marked leader, or the one marked creative, or the one marked too late for that now. Just a plain door, unlabeled, that you have walked past a hundred times because every other door had a sign you already believed. What would it cost you to open it, just to see what is on the other side, before deciding it isn’t for you?

This is not an argument against self-knowledge. It is an argument against finality. You can know your patterns and still remain, underneath them, unfinished — which is a much better word than broken, and a far more honest one than complete.

A Different Set of Clothes

Franciscan spirituality has never had much patience for fixed identities. Francis himself traded the label of merchant’s son for nothing very impressive at all — beggar, fool, brother to lepers and wolves — and every one of those was a door without a sign on it when he first walked through. He did not know what he was becoming. He simply stopped defending the label he already had.

Maybe that is the real practice hiding inside this question. Not ever labeling ourselves, which is impossible and not even desirable. But holding the labels loosely enough that we can still be surprised by our own growth. Loosely enough to try on a different set of clothes, a different room, a different corner of the parish or the office or the family, without first checking whether it matches who we have always said we are.

The corner may be comfortable, but grace rarely knocks on doors we’ve already labeled closed.

 

 

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