COMMON PRAYER — The Day's Stretch Theme: keeping on when the end is years away

Rev. Frances Calder: It is Wednesday, the seventh of October. This week we explore how to keep going at something that will take years to finish. Jason Lewis was twenty-six, an Englishman with little money, when he set off from Greenwich in July nineteen ninety-four with his friend Stevie Smith and a wooden pedal boat named Moksha. The plan was to go round the world by human power alone: pedalling the oceans, cycling and skating the land, no sail, no engine. Nineteen years ago this week he finished. In between lay four thousand eight hundred and thirty-three days, almost none of them with the end in sight. The expedition took his legs from him for the best part of a year, cost him the company of the friend who had started it with him, and ran out of money so completely that the boat sat in storage for years while he raised the funds to go on. What carried him was never a view of the finish. It was the next day's distance. On Sunday Hindu families begin Shardiya Navratri, nine nights kept for the goddess Durga and the victory she won. On the first evening a pot of earth is sown and set in the house, and the household kneels to it each night, through the evenings when nothing has come up and the evenings when it has. Most of us have a long thing of our own with no end in view. How do we keep going when the finish is years away? I invite you to put your phone down, take a break from the messages asking for an answer, and reflect on how to be a better human and live a good life. Let the music take you in. A jam jar of barley seed has no idea what you are hoping for. It sits on the windowsill where every child has put one, a wad of damp cotton wool and a scatter of hard brown grains, and for days it does nothing at all. You look on the first morning and there is a jar of wet wool. You look on the second and there is a jar of wet wool. By the fourth you suspect the seed is a dud, or that you have drowned it, or that the whole business of growing things was a rumour. The wool dries by evening. So you water it, which feels faintly ridiculous, because you are pouring water on nothing. Then one morning a seed has split, and there is a white thread, no thicker than a hair, pointing downward. Not upward. The first thing a seed does is go the wrong way, into the dark, where nobody can see it and nothing can be admired. The green comes later, and it comes slowly, and it comes only to the jars that were kept damp through the days when there was nothing to show for it. That is the whole secret of growing, and it is not much of a secret. The jar cannot be hurried. You can put it in a warmer place; you can talk to it, if you are that sort of person; you can stand over it with the lamp on. The seed keeps its own calendar. What it needs from you is not cleverness. It is the small, unglamorous faithfulness of the watering can, every morning, including the mornings you have forgotten why. Most of us have something on the windowsill. The degree that will take six years. The debt that will take ten. The child who will not be reasonable until they are thirty. The business, the book, the language, the body slowly mended after it broke. Keeping on when the end is years away: that is this hour. And the cost of it is never the grand cost we rehearsed for. It is the back that aches by Wednesday. It is the friends who started with you and quietly stopped, who were sensible to stop. It is the money that ran out in the second year. Above all it is the long stretch of mornings in which the jar looks exactly as it looked yesterday, and you water it anyway, feeling a fool. We are good at the first morning and the last. We are poor at the two hundredth, the one with no thread of white, when the easiest thing in the world is to leave the can where it is. The seed will not sulk. It simply dries. So how do we keep going when the finish is years away? The barley answers plainly. Not by seeing the harvest. By lifting the can this morning, and pouring, and setting it down, and coming back tomorrow to the same jar of wet wool. The long thing is kept alive by the day's small faithfulness, and that is where it costs. This morning we watch a pot set on a first night and a boat pushed off from a pier, and we follow what it takes to keep going when the end is years off and nothing yet shows. We will see the price paid in bone, in money and in company, and the place where straining ahead and letting go pull against each other. Then we will be left with what the day in front of us actually asks.

Pandit Mohan Iyer: On Sunday, before the sun is up, in homes across India, a mother or a grandfather clears the northeast corner of the house and sets down a low wooden platform with a red cloth over it. Onto the cloth goes a wide clay pot. Into the pot goes clean soil, and into the soil a handful of barley seed, pressed down with the thumb. Then the kalash, a round vessel of brass or clay, is filled: water first, then a few coins, a betel nut, a pinch of rice. It is set on the bed of soil, and a lamp is lit beside it. That is Ghatasthapana, the establishing of the pot, and it is the first act of Shardiya Navratri. What has been made is this: a pot of mud with a jar of water on top of it. Nothing green. Nothing to show the neighbours. The keepers have begun nine nights with bare earth, and they know it. The barley will not break the surface for three or four days, and what they are keeping the nights for is not a crop at all but a victory, and the victory is nine nights off. The Bhagavad Gita, which Krishna speaks to the prince Arjuna on the eve of a battle, has a word for the heart that wants the green now, and for what to do with such a heart. Lakshmi Narayanan reads it.

Lakshmi Narayanan: Hero long-armed! beyond denial, hard Man's heart is to restrain, and wavering; Yet may it grow restrained by habit, Prince! By wont of self-command. This Yog, I say, Cometh not lightly to th' ungoverned ones; But he who will be master of himself Shall win it, if he stoutly strive thereto.

Pandit Mohan Iyer: Why nine nights? The story our grandmothers tell is that the goddess Durga fought the buffalo demon Mahishasura for nine nights before the tenth day brought victory, and so the household keeps the goddess for the nine nights, not for the tenth day. Each evening a different form of the goddess is honoured, each evening the lamp is lit before the pot, each evening a little water is poured on the soil, and each evening somebody kneels and looks for a shoot. On the fourth or fifth evening it comes: a few pale spikes, then a thick green brush standing taller than the kalash. Children measure it against a finger. By the ninth night it is a hand high, and the whole house has watched it grow from nothing. The Gita, in its eighteenth chapter, sets down the plain arithmetic of all this in four lines, and Ravi Shankar Rao has them.

Ravi Shankar Rao: The fruit of labours, in the lives to come, Is threefold for all men,--Desirable, And Undesirable, and mixed of both; But no fruit is at all where no work was.

Pandit Mohan Iyer: On the tenth morning the barley is cut, and strands of it go behind the ears of the family and into the pockets of the ones who are away. But the cutting is a minute. The festival was the nine evenings. No household waits for the tenth day to feel that Navratri has begun; it begins when the thumb presses the seed into the mud. The keepers kneel to the pot each night because the kneeling is the worship, and it is worship on the first evening, with nothing up, every bit as much as on the ninth, with the green brushing their hands.

Rev. Frances Calder: Christina Rossetti wrote Up-hill in eighteen seventy-five, and it does the thing the pot on Sunday is careful not to do: it lifts its head from the evening's work and looks at the entire road. Her traveller wants to know how far it goes and how long it takes, and gets a straight answer every time. Margaret Ellison reads it.

Margaret Ellison: Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

Rev. Frances Calder: Yes, to the very end: that is the whole road seen at once, and it is the size of it, laid out in one glance, that stops most people before their first step. From a pot watered each evening to a kitchen fed by hands each morning: the house is different and so is the work, but here too the road shrinks to the size of a task. Bhai Harjit Singh, who has served in the Sikh community kitchen most of his life, begins in a forest.

Bhai Harjit Singh: In Goindwal, on the river Beas in the Punjab, in the middle of the sixteenth century, a young man named Jetha walked into the forest every morning for firewood. He carried it back on his head to the kitchen of Guru Amar Das. Then he drew water from the well, bucket after bucket, and when the food was cooked he carried the bowls out to whoever had come. The next morning he did it again. The forest did not get nearer. The well did not get shallower. He did this for years, and the rows of people sitting on the floor to eat did not get shorter, because that kitchen fed everyone who walked in and asked nothing of them. We call this seva, service, and the langar is where it is learned: the open kitchen where the food is free and everyone eats in a row on the floor, prince and sweeper side by side. Jetha did not know what he was becoming. He became Guru Ram Das, the fourth Guru, the one who founded Amritsar. But in the forest with a load of wood on his head he was a man with a morning's task, and a morning asks for nothing more than that. Guru Nanak sang of what repeated work does to the one who repeats it, and Harleen Kaur carries his hymn.

Harleen Kaur: By the practice of truth, truth is obtained; O false ones, false is your pride. Nanak, they for whom it was so ordered from the beginning meet the True Guru. My Lord is effulgent, if any one reflect on it. Nanak, serve Him who giveth ever and ever; Nanak serve Him by whose service sorrow departeth, Sins are erased, merits take their place, and peace abideth in the heart.

Bhai Harjit Singh: The cost of it is dull, which is why people stop. A back that has carried wood at dawn for a year has nothing to show for it that a back could not have shown in a week. Nobody praises the ten thousandth bucket. At the Golden Temple in Amritsar this morning the volunteers at the long steel benches are rolling rotis they will not eat, for people they will not meet, and they rolled them yesterday, and they will roll them tomorrow, and the queue through the hall does not end because the city does not end. The hands do not look up. They do not need the far end of the queue; they need the next ball of dough, flattened, turned, flattened, passed down the bench to the griddle. The body learns a road the way a child learns a verse, by saying it again, and the body that has repeated a thing a thousand mornings carries it on the morning the mind has forgotten why.

Rev. Frances Calder: The habit of the hands has a smaller cousin kept in houses rather than kitchens, and two more traditions keep it with a rule: small and steady over large and rare. In Muslim homes the rule is a coin a day. On a shelf by the door sits a tin, and each morning somebody drops in a small fixed sum, fifty pence and no more, before leaving the house, and the tin fills slowly for whoever will need it. The saying the household lives by is that the deed most loved is the small one done without a break. Aisha Rahman has two verses from the eighteenth chapter of the Qur'an, the chapter called The Cave.

Aisha Rahman: Lo! as for those who believe and do good works - Lo! We suffer not the reward of one whose work is goodly to be lost. Wealth and children are an ornament of the life of the world. But the good deeds which endure are better in thy Lord's sight for reward, and better in respect of hope.

Rev. Frances Calder: Another house, another rule, with the end set years out. On commuter trains into Jerusalem and New York this morning, men and women open a volume of the Talmud to the same page, the one page the whole world is studying on this one day. A page a day, every day, and the cycle through the whole Talmud takes something over seven years. Nobody reads ahead; the page does not wait. The Mishnah's book of sayings, Pirkei Avot, sets down the rule those readers keep, and Cantor Asher Mendel reads it.

Cantor Asher Mendel: Rabbi Tarfon said, "The day is short, the task is great, the laborers are sluggish, the reward is much, and the Master of the house is urgent." He also used to say, "It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it; if thou hast studied much Torah, much reward will be given thee; and faithful is thy Employer to pay thee the reward of thy labor; and know that the grant of reward unto the righteous will be in the time to come."

Rev. Frances Calder: A coin at the door and a page on the train: neither house asks its keeper to finish the thing, and neither lets its keeper walk away from it because the end is out of sight. The hands have their task and the houses have their rule, and now the thing inside us that spoils both. Master Zhang Wen, who teaches the Daoist way, turns to the hunger of the one who is keeping on.

Master Zhang Wen: The enemy of the long road is not laziness. It is the wish to be done. Every morning in the park of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, before the traffic starts, old men and women move through the slow form of taiji, so slowly that a passer-by thinks they are standing still. A young man joins them. His arms are strong; he wants to reach the end of the form; he hurries, and his balance goes, and the old woman beside him, who is seventy and has never hurried in her life, is still exactly where she should be. That hunger to push harder than the day allows is the thing we train. It feels like virtue. It is appetite. The person who forces the pace is spending next week's strength this morning, and the bill comes due in the body, in the temper, and in the quitting. Chuang Tzu tells of a cook who carved an ox for Prince Hui so smoothly that the prince cried out at the sight of it; Wang Xiu has the cook's answer.

Wang Xiu: "Well done!" cried the Prince. "Yours is skill indeed." "Sire," replied the cook; "I have always devoted myself to TAO. It is better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me simply whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals. And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me stop, but my mind urges me on, I fall back upon eternal principles. I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through joints: still less through large bones.

Master Zhang Wen: The cook does not cut through the bone. Where the knife meets resistance he stops, finds where the joint already opens, and goes there. The cost of learning this is pride. A person who pushes looks heroic; a person who yields to the shape of the day looks, to the hurrying world, as if they are not trying, and the hurrying world says so. Water is the teacher here. A stream does not strain to reach the sea. It takes the slope it is given, pools where it must pool, arrives anyway, and nothing in the valley is stronger than it. The one who forces the pace breaks before the road ends. The one who does the day's distance, and wants the day's distance and not one mile more, is still walking in the thirteenth year.

Rev. Frances Calder: The kitchen says keep the hands moving and the park says stop pushing, and the question is what size a task has to be for both to be true at once. Seneca, the Stoic writing letters to his friend Lucilius from Rome in the first century, answers it.

Seneca: How, then, shall we avoid this vacillation? In one way only,—if there be no reaching forward in our life, if it is withdrawn into itself. For he only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable. But when I have paid my soul its due, when a soundly-balanced mind knows that a day differs not a whit from eternity—whatever days or problems the future may bring—then the soul looks forth from lofty heights and laughs heartily to itself when it thinks upon the ceaseless succession of the ages.

Rev. Frances Calder: A day that differs not a whit from eternity: that is a ruler the length of one morning. The thing on the desk this morning, the one with no finish in sight, gets measured against the whole, six years or forty thousand miles, and against the whole a morning is nothing, so the hands slow and the appetite says push. Seneca turns the ruler round. The day is the unit. The stretch is begun, done, and set down at the end of it, a small life started and finished before sleep, with nothing reaching forward into years it cannot see. Then the long thing is not one unfinished labour hanging over the house; it is a row of days, each of them complete. And the two halves of the hour meet: the hands keep going because there is a day's work in front of them, and nobody forces the pace because there is only a day's work in front of them. The practical gift is a unit small enough to finish. The day made whole, and the end out of sight is simply not this morning's business. Pandit Mohan Iyer weighs what the nine nights ask of the body, and why anyone pays it.

Pandit Mohan Iyer: We have made the day the measure, so let me say honestly what the days cost. During the nine nights of Navratri a great many families keep a fast: no grain, no onion, no garlic, one meal in the evening of fruit and milk and buckwheat, for nine days, while going to work. In Gujarat, after the lamp is lit before the pot, the whole town goes out to dance the garba in a wide circle until long after midnight, and is back at its desk by nine. By the fourth night the legs ache. By the sixth the fast has stopped feeling holy and started feeling like hunger. And every night, kneeling to the pot, the keeper sees that the pot looks very much like the pot. The soil is damp and dark, the seed is doing whatever seed does under the surface, and it does not report to anyone. Aristotle, who was no devotee but who watched human beings closely, allowed that "amusement is like rest, and men want rest because unable to labour continuously." He is right about the body. It cannot keep nine nights at once. That is why the keeping is broken into evenings: a night, a sleep, a day of work, another night. Nobody is asked for nine nights together. They are asked for this one, and then for the next. So stay with the keeper in Gujarat on the fourth night. She has danced three nights running on a supper of fruit and milk, and her legs know it on the stairs. She waters the pot before she goes out, and the water sinks into the same dark soil it sank into yesterday, and nothing green answers. On the sixth night the hunger is simply hunger; it has no halo left. The circle is as wide as ever and the music as loud, and she takes her place in it anyway, not because she feels anything, but because it is the sixth night and the sixth night is danced. She kneels to the pot, and the pot looks like the pot. That is the whole of the cost: not one great sacrifice, but an ordinary evening, nine times over, when the body would rather sit down and the soil gives no sign. And it is paid in the middle, on the fourth night and the sixth, when the first night's gladness has gone and the ninth is nowhere in sight. Is it worth it? Here is why, and it is not because the barley will come up; she cannot see that from where she kneels. One good night makes no more a devotee than one warm evening makes a summer. A person who keeps one Navratri hopes. A person who keeps the nine nights, and the nine the year after, and the nine the year after that, becomes someone the fast no longer argues with. That is what the repeating buys. Not the victory, which belongs to the tenth day, but a self that holds. The keeper does not become steadfast on the ninth night with the green under her hands; she becomes steadfast on the sixth, hungry, with nothing to show, when she kneels anyway. Hope she had for nothing on the first night; steadiness she has bought, one aching evening at a time, and it is the buying again and again that makes it hers.

Rev. Frances Calder: Now the rule of one day goes out into the weather. Picture one morning, somewhere in the stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and the atoll of Tarawa, where the wind dies and the sea lies flat as a plate. A twenty-six-foot wooden boat called Moksha sits on that water. She has no sail and no motor; she is pedalled, like a bicycle, and there is one man aboard to pedal her. Jason Lewis wakes in the cabin to the same thing he woke to yesterday: no wind, no swell, no sound but the hull ticking as the sun comes onto it. He lights the stove and makes the first meal of the day. He opens the log and writes down yesterday's miles, a small number, the same small number as the day before. Then he climbs onto the seat and begins to pedal, and the horizon, which has nothing on it, stays exactly where it was. Nobody speaks to him, because there is nobody to speak. He will do this for seventy-three days, and on this morning he does not know which of the seventy-three it is going to be, because the sea gives no sign; it looks on the fortieth day as it looked on the first. What he can see is the next hour, the next meal, the next line in the log. That is the whole of the visible world, and it has to be enough. He has already learned that the hard way. Behind him is a road in Pueblo, Colorado, where a drunk driver hit him on his inline skates and broke both his legs, and nine months in which the whole expedition lay as still as this sea. Behind him is the harbour at Hilo, where Stevie Smith, who had pedalled this same boat across the Atlantic with him and across the Pacific as far as Hawaii, ended his part of it and went home, and the boat left the shore with one seat empty. And ahead of him, though he cannot know it on this morning, are years when the money will run out so completely that Moksha goes into storage and he spends not months but years raising the funds to go on, and nothing moves an inch. The crash was a kind of weather. The friend going home was a kind of weather. The empty bank account was a kind of weather. The flat sea is only the plainest of them, because it hides nothing: it shows a man exactly how far the end is by showing him nothing at all. He went on pedalling. He reached Tarawa. Years later he would come back up the river to the line he had left from, the first person ever to go round the world on human power alone, forty-six thousand five hundred and five miles through thirty-seven countries, thirteen years from the day he set out. But none of that was on the horizon that morning in the doldrums. There was the stove, the log, the seat, the small number of miles, and a finish that was not merely far but out of sight entirely. How do we keep going when the finish is years away? Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher writing at Cambridge in the years before the First World War, takes the question out of one man's boat and asks what keeping on means when nothing out there promises a shore.

Bertrand Russell: The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man's deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Rev. Frances Calder: Citizens of the universe, not of one walled city. The person who needs the world to guarantee an arrival is in the thrall of a narrow hope, and narrow hopes break on the first flat week with no wind. Russell's free person does the day's good as a small part of a whole that never depended on them, and so is not insulted when the shore stays out of sight. What a day's pedalling was worth was settled in the pedalling, before any shore came or failed to come, and a flat sea, a shut border or an empty account can slow the man down, but none of them can reach back and unmake what he has already done. There is a morning the hour has not yet faced: the first one back, after nine months in a Colorado bed or years with the boat in a shed. Canon Walter Pelham, an Anglican canon, takes it.

Canon Walter Pelham: The first morning back is the hard one, and the question on it is not whether to go on but how to begin again without trying to recover what was lost. In the Church of England a parish priest is bound to say Morning Prayer every day, in the chancel of the church if the door can be opened, at home if it cannot, whether or not a single other soul turns up. The psalms are set out across the month so that each day has its own. If a priest is ill for a fortnight, the fortnight's psalms are not said later. On the morning she is well she opens the book to that day's date and says that day's office, and the missed pages stay missed. That is the practice: take up today's page. The reason is plain. A daily thing cannot be done in arrears; fourteen days of prayer said in one afternoon is not fourteen days of prayer, it is a reading. Paul, writing to the church at Philippi from a prison cell, knew about ground that could not be got back, and Helen Carmichael has his sentence.

Helen Carmichael: Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Canon Walter Pelham: Forgetting those things which are behind. The cost of resuming is that you resume as a beginner. The legs that skated a continent are nine months weaker. The hands that pedalled an ocean have spent years writing letters asking for money. And the sharpest cost is the arithmetic: the voice that says you are so far behind that the only honest course is to make it up, to do two days in one, to run. That voice ends more long things than any illness does. The person who goes again does a plain day. The priest after her fortnight does not add the missed psalms to the morning's; she says the appointed ones, slowly, closes the book, and goes to put the kettle on. The fortnight is not owed back. Today's page is the whole of the work, said as though it were the first page she ever opened, and the pages she never reached stay shut behind her, not as a debt to be settled but simply as the days that happened.

Rev. Frances Calder: Paul Laurence Dunbar's Vagrants was published in nineteen thirteen, and it says what no practice in this hour removes: a traveller who cannot stop even at the taverns, who does not know the goal, and who does not much like the company he is keeping on the road, which is his own. Here it is, in Beatrice Nwosu's voice.

Long time ago, we two set out, My soul and I. I know not why, For all our way was dim with doubt. I know not where We two may fare: Though still with every changing weather, We wander, groping on together. We do not love, we are not friends, My soul and I. He lives a lie; Untruth lines every way he wends. A scoffer he Who jeers at me: And so, my comrade and my brother, We wander on and hate each other. Ay, there be taverns and to spare, Beside the road; But some strange goad Lets me not stop to taste their fare. Knew I the goal Toward which my soul And I made way, hope made life fragrant: But no. We wander, aimless, vagrant!

Rev. Frances Calder: Dunbar's traveller never learns where he is bound, and he goes on anyway. The man who pedalled a wooden craft across two oceans over thirteen years was handed no more certainty than that vagrant, and he did not shed his doubt somewhere in the doldrums and arrive without it; seventy-three days alone on that water, the not-knowing sat beside him, and the day's distance still got done. Seneca shrank the task to the size of a single day. A man pedalled seventy-three such days alone across a sea with no wind, and the Canon gave us the first morning back, with nothing made up. So here is the difficulty, named: the finish is years away, it may never come, and because of that this morning's stretch of it can feel pointless. One night's kneeling at a pot of mud is nothing against nine nights. One day's pedalling is nothing against forty-six thousand miles. Why do the small thing when the large thing may never arrive? Here is the answer. The pointlessness is a trick of the ruler. We hold the day against the whole and the day vanishes; but the whole was never going to be done except as days, and no one has ever done a long thing any other way. Laozi said it twenty-five centuries ago: "A journey of a thousand li starts beneath one's feet." Beneath the feet, not at the far end. The thousand li are not a thing you can hold; they are a name for a great many places where feet once were. The seventy-three days. Nobody who has pedalled a boat across the doldrums can say which of those days got him to Tarawa. None did, and all did. And yet each of them was a real day, with a real distance, a meal cooked on a stove, a sleep, and the sea a few miles further behind. If the boat had sunk on the seventy-fourth morning, those seventy-three would not have been undone. They were whole. That is what Seneca meant, and it is what the park in Beijing and the kitchen in Amritsar and the pot on Sunday are all keeping: a day complete in itself, not an instalment on a thing that may default. Now the honest qualification. The day's stretch does not buy the shore. Some long things do not finish. The degree is given up in the fourth year because the money really did run out. The body does not mend all the way. The business closes. The friend who stepped off in Hawaii went home, and he was right to, and the days he had pedalled across the Atlantic were still his, still good, and the circumnavigation he did not complete did not reach back and spoil one of them. The stretch is not a bet on an ending. If it were a bet, it would be a bad one, and the doubting voice in Dunbar's poem would have the last word. So the act, and it is small, and it is for tomorrow. Do today's stretch of it. The picture is this: Thursday, early, the long thing in front of you, the pages or the scales or the mile or the letter to the bank or the exercises the physiotherapist set, and the day's share of it gets done, the share and not more, and gets set down finished before the front door closes behind you. Not the week's share. Not yesterday's missed share. The day's. Done and closed, like a day in Seneca's letter, like a page on a train, like a bucket carried from a well in Goindwal. This is where the hope is. A life spent at a long thing is not thirteen years of not having finished. It is four thousand eight hundred and thirty-three finished days, and it would have been a row of finished days if the row had stopped at a thousand. Nobody has to see the far shore to make this one day good. The stove gets lit, the meal gets eaten, the sea goes a few miles further behind, and that day is paid in full on the evening it is done, long before anyone knows whether the boat will ever come up the river to the line it left from. Three places this week where the day's stretch will feel pointless. In the practice room and at the desk, where the same scales and the same twelve pages are gone over again and the recording and the manuscript are no nearer than they were in June: a blessing on the going over. At the kitchen table, where the lunches are made and the homework checked and the lights go off at the same hour, while the debt, the degree, the slow recovery show nothing at all: a blessing on the keeping of the hour. And on the first morning back from the illness or the setback, when the lost time whispers that it is too late and the only honest course is to run: a blessing on the plain day. Strength for the small thing, and the company of people doing the same small thing in other rooms, and for all of us, by the end of next week, the first green in a sown pot. Rabbi Daniel Aaronson has one line from the hundred and twenty-second psalm.

Rabbi Daniel Aaronson: Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee.

Rev. Frances Calder: The barley seed on the windowsill goes on splitting in the dark this morning while nobody is looking, and the white thread goes down before it ever goes up. One small grace to carry out of the door: the hidden stretch counts, and the seed keeps its own calendar whatever you are hoping for. Go well, and may you live this week as the person you hope to be.