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Available for 23 days

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Saarah Hamayun In a small village in South Asia, a young Afghan boy once taught me how to make a kite with a plastic bag, two sticks and some string. He then spent the evening teaching me how to make it fly. I ran and leapt and threw it into the air and hung it off the wall and then jumped some more but I couldn’t even get it a metre off the ground; I passed it to him and with a flick of his wrist he skilfully raised the kite until it was just a speck in the dusky sky. I stood watching him guide the kite as it danced on the breeze, the horizon now alive with colourful, rustling tissue-paper kites and the laughter of children rising through the evening air. There is an ancient wisdom in life on the Eastern side of the world, where the sense of urgency can be as distant as the highest kite in the sky. Here in contrast, we may struggle to find the time for everything and everyone. We make plans and write lists as if God has granted us the certainty of tomorrow. Too often, we forget to pause. There, I found a slower movement of time, a pace in which I can catch up with myself, a place where I no longer neglect myself. The world even seems to breathe slower, and I begin to match its rhythm, as the car twists around the bends of the mountain road and my head is in a haze, my eyelids heavy from travel, even though I can’t bear to miss the view. But my mind and body are at ease, knowing they have time to recharge, a moment away from all the distractions and excess. I pray we each give ourselves time to recharge, to listen to our body when it whispers for rest because in the slowing, something sacred happens - the water clears, the heart steadies. May we learn that stillness is not a bad thing, it is healing, and it is renewal. Amen