This photo appeared on my phone this morning. I did not ask for it. Some app decided I should see it again. It is a sunrise, taken from a window seat, half asleep, somewhere above the clouds. I had completely forgotten that flight. And then there it was, the light coming up through a gap in the grey.
The first hour of a new week is the one hour when the week is still open. By that afternoon, someone else will have decided it for me. They will send a message that begins with the word “quick”.
So I use the hour.
Leonard Cohen said that everything is cracked, and that the cracks are how the light gets in. He meant it as a way of seeing the world. I have turned it into a weekly habit, which I think he would have found funny.
Last week had cracks in it. There was the meeting that went nowhere and used four hours of my calendar. There was the piece of work I promised to finish and did not. And there was the moment when I was short with a colleague, over a formatting problem.
Normally, I would move on. I would call it a bad week, promise to do better, and make more coffee.
This time, I am trying ten minutes and two questions.
Where did last week crack, and what is it showing me?
One crack, not a list. If I make a list, by the fourth item it becomes a judgement on my character, and nobody needs that so early.
So I choose one. Usually the one that still bothers me. Then I look underneath it.
For example: my missed deadlines are rarely about time. They are things that people agreed to at the end of a long meeting. I had kept that meeting running, because I do not stop, and because I had forgotten that everyone else wanted lunch an hour earlier. At that point, people will agree to anything.
In the same way, being short with a colleague is rarely about that colleague. If I sit with it for two minutes, the real reason usually appears by itself.
That is the crack doing its job.
What does that make obvious for this week?
Noticing is only half of it. Otherwise it is just a hobby.
If the crack was taking on too much, then this week needs a conversation about scope. If it is work I keep avoiding, then it needs an hour today, while the week is still mine. And if it is tiredness, mine or other people’s, then it needs an evening kept free, and a break called before anyone has to ask for one.
One crack, one response.
Some weeks this works. Other weeks the notebook stays closed, and in March I discover that I have written three entries.
Still, a week is a good size. It is long enough for real work, and short enough that starting again feels easy.
I do not have to repair everything. The cracks stay, in the week, in the work, and in me. That is normal. And it is also how I can see well enough to choose what matters.
The photo I had forgotten. The week I have not started yet. Ten minutes, before the inbox.