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“Michael, You Are Such a Fidget”

My mother had a phrase for me. She would say it with a sigh, sometimes with a smile, and occasionally with the particular Irish tone mothers reserve for a child who has just created an imaginary new game from a wooden stick: “Michael, you are such a fidget.”

She was right. I was always on the move. Moving towards the next thing as soon as the last one was finished. Always wanting to know how something worked. To know what the word “omnipresent” meant at six years of age, or to try something no one had asked me to try. If there was a new path, I wanted to walk it. If there was no path, I created one. If there was a better way, I wanted to find and explore it.

The fidget grew up, but never really sat down. Today we have kinder words for him. We might call him an entrepreneur, or a creative, or say he is wired a certain way. Some would hand him a personality type and a number. But none of those labels quite touch the thing itself: a restlessness that keeps compelling us forward, a desire to make something better, to change it, to discover it, even when some quiet part of us already knows we will never quite arrive.

I have come to believe that restlessness is not a flaw to be managed. It may be one of the ways God has been calling us all along.

The Restless Heart

Sixteen centuries ago, Augustine began his Confessions with a sentence that has outlived empires: Our heart is restless until it rests in you.

We usually hear that line as a criticism of restlessness, as if the goal of the spiritual life were to finally stop squirming. But read it again. Augustine is not condemning the restless heart. He is explaining it. The restlessness is a homing instinct. It is the heart’s way of knowing it was made for something larger than anything it has found so far.

The writer Ronald Rolheiser makes a similar point. Every one of us, he says, carries a fire inside: an unquenchable longing, an energy that will not let us settle. Spirituality is not about putting that fire out. It is about what we do with it.

I used to think of the fidget in me as the opposite of the Holy Longing, the inward pull that draws us toward God. One moves outward, the other inward. One builds and tinkers and explores; the other waits in silence. But I no longer think they are opposites. I think they are the same desire, facing in different directions. The question is not whether we are restless. The question is which way our restlessness is pointing.

The Noonday Demon

The desert fathers knew the shadow side of the fidget well. Evagrius, a fourth-century monk, wrote about a temptation he called acedia, the noonday demon. It came in the heat of the day, when the monk sat in his cell. Suddenly the hours seemed endless. He would get up, look out the window, check the sun, wonder whether the brothers in some other monastery had it better. Anything to avoid staying where he was.

That is the fidget as flight. The motion looks like energy, but it is really escape: from silence, from ourselves, from whatever might be waiting for us if we stopped long enough to meet it.

There is a modern version too, and it often looks virtuous. A comedian once built a whole career on the phrase “Git ‘er done.” Most of us have a little of that inside. Call it the robot within: the part of us that keeps producing, fixing, improving, and checking things off, not because love is drawing us but because stopping feels dangerous. The robot can do a great deal of good work. It can even do holy work. It just cannot rest.

I will confess that I know this robot. I have spent part of my life helping people find their way to stillness, leading retreats, teaching prayer, creating space for others to encounter the divine within. And more than once I have caught myself so busy making room for other people’s silence that I left none for my own.

Straining Forward

And yet the tradition does not tell the fidget to stop. It tells him where to go.

St. Paul wrote to the Philippians that he had not yet arrived, but that he was straining forward to what lies ahead. Gregory of Nyssa took that image and built a whole spirituality from it. He called it epektasis: the soul’s endless stretching toward God. Because God is infinite, Gregory said, we never reach the end of God. We never arrive, sit down, and declare ourselves finished. Each discovery opens onto a larger one. The more we find, the more we long for. Perfection is not standing still. It is never ceasing to grow.

That is the fidget made holy. Not the restlessness that flees, but the restlessness that explores. Not the robot, but the pilgrim.

The old Celtic monks had their own version. Some of them set out to sea in small boats called coracles, sometimes without oars, letting the wind carry them wherever God intended. They called it peregrinatio, wandering for the love of God. They were not running away from anything. They were moving toward a place they had not yet seen, trusting that the movement itself was a kind of prayer.

Which Way Is It Pointing?

Looking back on my own life, I can see the fidget at every turn. I spent years in the world of technology, starting a company and mapping how work moves from one hand to another. Then the same restless mind turned toward ministry, toward theology, toward prayer. And somewhere along the way, the fidget became a teacher of centering prayer, the stillest practice I know.

I do not think that was an accident. We often teach what we most need to learn.

What I have learned is that the fidget does not need to be cured. It needs to be noticed. When I feel that familiar urge to move, to start, to improve, to fix, I have begun asking a few simple questions:

  • Am I moving toward something, or away from something?
  • Is this motion leaving room for me to be surprised?
  • If I stopped for an hour, what am I afraid I would meet?
  • Is this restlessness feeding others, or only feeding the robot?

None of those questions require us to stop moving. They only ask us to move with our eyes open. That, I think, is what sacred noticing has always been for people like me. It does not ask the fidget to sit perfectly still. It asks him to keep walking, but to walk awake.

Let Us Begin Again

Near the end of his life, worn out and nearly blind, St. Francis turned to his brothers and said, Let us begin, brothers, for up to now we have done little or nothing.

This was the man who had rebuilt churches with his own hands, walked across battle lines to meet a sultan, and gathered thousands of followers. And at the end, he wanted to start over. That is not the voice of a man who failed to rest. It is the voice of a man whose restlessness had finally become love. Beginner’s mind, all the way to the last breath.

So if you have spent your life being told to sit still, settle down, and finish what you started, take heart. Your fidget may be the Holy Longing itself, still looking for home. The work is not to stop it, but to turn it toward God.

The Church has always understood this, which may be why it gave its fidgeters something to do with their hands: rosary beads, prayer ropes, a labyrinth to walk, a road to make pilgrimage on. This week, try a fidget prayer. Take a walk without a destination, or hold a set of beads, or simply let your hands move while your heart settles. Let the body fidget so the soul can rest.

My mother was right. I am such a fidget. I am beginning to think God made me that way on purpose.

Where is your restlessness carrying you right now—toward something, or away from something?

What might change if, for a while, you don’t demand that it stop, but you ask what it’s trying to point to?

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

 

 

 

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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

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“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.

 

 

 

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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.

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