I meditate first thing in the morning every day. I’ve experimented with apps, but found them distracting. I joke that the countdown timer on my phone is my app, set to 33 minutes. I start the timer, then sit down and meditate until it goes off. Why 33 minutes? I ramped up over time and that’s where I’ve reached.

I can usually tell around when the time is nearly up. When I started my legs would start to hurt after a few minutes. Now they might feel like they’re falling asleep slightly near the end, but not much. Then while meditating the other day, my legs started hurting a lot. I couldn’t understand why they hurt so much. Plus it felt like I was meditating a long time.

Once, maybe a year or two ago, I accidentally started the stopwatch instead of the countdown timer. Since the stopwatch goes up and never hits an alarm, I ended up meditating until my legs hurt so much I had to stop, thinking I stopped in the middle. At the time I meditated 30 minutes daily, but this day, the stopwatch showed nearly an hour when I looked. I had thought I was giving up early but instead had gone nearly double.

When my legs hurt the other day, I wondered if I had hit the stopwatch, but I was pretty sure I had confirmed it was the countdown. Still, my legs hurt and I felt like I had meditated longer than usual. I opened my eyes and checked the phone: No, it was counting down and had 1:45 left.

I felt like I had given up and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t handle something so usual. Was I sick? Stressed? I couldn’t tell.

Then later that day I went to use the timer for something else and realized that the day before I had set it for 56 minutes for something unrelated to meditation and had forgotten to restore it to 33 minutes.

So I had meditated nearly 54 minutes, thinking I had given up at 31 minutes. I felt silly about the mistake, but accomplished about the long session.

A trivial fun book thing I did

At a thrift store, I noticed the following situation on the shelves. If you look carefully, on the far left of the middle shelf is a big book on Harry Truman. On the far right of that shelf is a big book on Truman Capote.

I moved the Capote book so now the shelf said “Truman Capote.”

I told you it was trivial. Still, I shared what I did with a customer also browsing the shelves and she enjoyed seeing it.

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