15 Minutes

Maybe you want to do yoga. Learn Hebrew, or French, or Yiddish, or Swahili. Maybe you want great abs, a great butt. You want to meditate, to release your mind, to concentrate on your breathing. Maybe you want to reflect and express gratitude at the end of your day; maybe you want to create affirmations through morning pages or journalling at the beginning. You want to pray, or foxtrot, or sing, or write.

Just practice, they say. Just start. 15 minutes a day.

I want to do a lot of these things. (Maybe not the Swahili or French.) And it seems my life lately is already measured not by coffee spoons, like poor Alfred Prufrock, but by a myriad of daily rituals and reflection. With only so much free time, how do you choose which 15 minutes to use?

I’m in Israel right now, blessed with the opportunity to travel on a magical school bus across the country with 40 college students from New York, and talented, inspiring colleagues. While this is my job right now—can you believe it?—it also feels like a personal chance to use my free time creatively and wisely.

And I choose to jump rope.

Not a lot, at first… because I can’t.

I want to spend my 15 minutes a day getting my heart pumping and chipping away at that gnawing feeling that I’m not using my body nearly as effectively as I use my head. Of all the things that feel foreign and far away to me, it seems sad that one is my own physical self.

I’m getting better at it already; today I jumped 55 times in a row–a record for me. That was after playing three-on-three basketball with some of the students (I love basketball but am not particularly good at that, either).

I’m still learning how to balance all those other 15 minute coffee spoons. Though I might have to foxtrot in another life… we’ll see.

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