Listening practice: ten minutes at the window

Sit somewhere you can see out. Ten minutes is plenty; five is fine. There is no breathing to count and nothing to arrive at.

The whole practice is this: listen outward rather than inward. Name the sounds as they come — a car, the boiler, someone upstairs — and let each one go without following it anywhere. When you notice you have gone back inside your own head, which you will, come back out to the next sound. That returning is the practice. It is not the failure of the practice.

This is useful in threshold time for a plain reason. In the middle of a change, the inside of your head is a loud and repetitive place, and it is running the same three arguments it has run all week. Ten minutes of attention pointed at something that is not you is not an escape from the situation. It is a rest from narrating it.