Unless It Is Proper Exercise I Do Not Bother

You put your shoes on and took them off again inside four minutes.

That happened on Tuesday. You had a gap, and you thought about going out, and you started to get ready, and then you looked at the actual amount of time available and it was about twelve minutes, and something in you said there is no point.

So you took the shoes off and did something useful instead and did not think about it again.

That sentence, there is no point, is the entire subject of this article. Not your legs. That sentence.

Because you have a threshold. You have never written it down or said it out loud, but you could tell me roughly what it is. It is somewhere around forty five minutes. Below that, whatever you were going to do does not qualify, and if it does not qualify then doing it would be slightly embarrassing, a gesture rather than a thing.

And so on a week like this one, where nothing over forty five minutes ever appears, you do nothing at all.

Not less. Nothing.

That is the arithmetic worth looking at, because it is the opposite of what the threshold thinks it is doing. The threshold believes it is protecting standards. What it actually produces is zero, every week, in a life that has plenty of ten minute gaps and almost no hour long ones.

You are not somebody who does not move because you lack discipline. You are somebody who does not move because you have set the entry price higher than anything your week can pay.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth

There is a line in Ecclesiastes about doing things, and what it does not say is the interesting part.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10, King James Version)

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do.

Findeth. Not whatever you have planned, not whatever you scheduled, not whatever meets the standard. Whatever your hand happens to come across.

That is a description of opportunistic action. It is about the thing in front of you right now, of whatever size it happens to be, and there is no qualifying threshold anywhere in the sentence.

And do it with thy might. Which people read as work hard, and it does mean that, but notice what it is attached to. It is attached to whatever turned up, not to whatever was worthy. The intensity goes into the found thing, however small the found thing is.

And then the reason, which is bracing and is meant to be: there is no work in the grave. That is not a threat, it is a statement about scarcity. There is a limited amount of doing available to a person, and the whole argument of the verse is to do what is in front of you now rather than wait for something better shaped.

Your twelve minutes on Tuesday was a thing your hand found.

And you declined it, on the grounds that it was not the right size, in favor of a forty five minute version that has not turned up in a fortnight and may not turn up this month either.

You are able to take what your hand finds at whatever size it is, and it has never once had to meet a threshold before it counted. Ecclesiastes 9:10 attaches the might to whatever turned up rather than to whatever qualified, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an entry price off somebody's week.

Ten minutes is not a smaller hour

Here is the part that I think will actually change something, and it is a correction rather than encouragement.

You are treating ten minutes as a fraction of a proper session. As about a fifth of a real thing, and therefore about a fifth as worth doing.

That is not what it is.

Ten minutes is not a small hour. It is a different object entirely, and the thing it does well is something an hour cannot do at all.

An hour requires arrangement. It has to be found, protected, and recovered from. That is why it happens rarely, and why missing it feels like a failure, and why a week with none in it produces nothing.

Ten minutes requires nothing. It happens between things. It survives a bad week, an unexpected phone call, a child needing something, all the events that destroy an hour. It is the only unit that is actually robust against your life as it currently is.

So the comparison is not one hour versus ten minutes. It is one hour that does not happen versus ten minutes that does, and stated that way you can see it immediately.

And I am not going to tell you what ten minutes a day produces, because I do not know and neither does anybody selling you something. What I can tell you is what it is: it is a person moving their body, today, which is a fact about today, whatever it does or does not produce later.

You are able to take the unit that survives your week, and ten minutes has never once been a fraction of a proper session. The written word attaches the doing to what the hand finds rather than to what was scheduled, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a robust ten minutes rather than a fragile hour.

Set the timer and move for all of it

So here is the assignment.

Set a timer for ten minutes and move for all of it, however slowly.

Set an actual timer, out loud, on your phone. Not a rough intention, because a rough intention ends when you get bored or when somebody calls your name, and the whole value here is that the ten minutes finishes.

Then move for the whole ten. Walk, up and down the street or round the yard or up and down the stairs if it is raining. Put music on and move round the kitchen. It genuinely does not matter what.

However slowly is not a concession, it is an instruction. Slow enough that you could hold a conversation. Slow enough that you will not need to recover, because needing to recover is what makes a thing require an hour.

And when the timer goes, stop, even if you feel fine.

Do not extend it. You will be tempted, especially the first time, and extending it is how ten minutes quietly becomes a session again, and a session has a threshold, and the threshold is the thing we are removing.

Ten minutes. Then get on with the evening.

You are able to set a timer and stop when it goes, and extending it has never once been what made a short thing worth doing. Ecclesiastes 9:10 puts the might into whatever the hand found without extending it into something larger, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody stopping at ten.