Three Minutes

"Cloudgate" Sculpture and Chicago Skyline

I'm back in Worcester after a wonderful week in Chicago, visiting fellow Jesuits, Dartmouth classmates, and friends from my days as a scholastic in St. Louis. The flight back today was delayed a little leaving Midway, but the crew made up almost all the time along the way, landing at Logan just a few minutes behind schedule. Thanks to the timely arrival of a Silver Line bus after a seemingly interminable wait at the baggage carousel, I was able to reach South Station, thread my way through a maze of stairs, turnstiles, and escalators, weave across a busy concourse, and onto the farthest car of a waiting commuter train to Worcester. Three minutes later, right on time, it left the platform.

For the previous three hours, I hadn't been terribly worried about missing that train, yet I knew that it would be the last one to Worcester until much later in the afternoon. As much as I love traveling, and savored the grace of feeling like a pilgrim in Chicago this week as I navigated elevated trains, buses, and the long blocks of that sprawling city, I tend to value punctuality, and to dislike perturbations in schedules and plans. Yet while sitting on that idling train, grateful that the progress of my journey matched its schedule, three minutes suddenly seemed like a decent length of time.

Amid my busy life as a teacher, which resumes nice and early tomorrow morning, I'm constantly looking for ways to dedicate and preserve my free time for life-giving and restorative pursuits: prayer and meditation, reading, writing letters, phone calls, and the like. I often envision such pursuits requiring longer periods of time: 20 minutes, half an hour, or more. But maybe I can do more, especially in the midst of the flurried breadth of activities and interactions at school, with three minutes. How about you?