6. Nurture your whole self: body, mind, and spirit.

I exercise daily. I cook good nutritious food and make it beautiful, a feast for the eyes as well as the body. I create food art. I nourish my mind with good reading. I don’t eat junk food, so I don’t fill my mind with junk either. “Tell me what you read, and I’ll tell you who you are,” someone said. I read widely but discriminately: spirituality, poetry, both classic and contemporary literature. I love a good detective story, especially Louise Penny’s series about Armand Gamache. And I often find a good film as inspiring and life-changing as a good book. I nurture my spirit through meditation and prayer, yes, but also through art, music, and nature. I enjoy as much beauty as I can every day, and look for it everywhere, even in the wrinkles on my friends’ faces – and my own. As Chinese actor Chow Yun- Fat says, “Every wrinkle is a life experience.”

7. Carve out “quiet time” every day.

I say “carve out” because it takes effort. No technology, unnecessary interactions or playing “catch-up” on work. Is the best quiet time for you in the morning before everyone else wakes up? In the evening after everyone goes to bed? Do you need to get up in the middle of the night? If quiet time is hard for you, carve it out in what Edward Ford calls “brief endurable chunks.” Blaise Pascal said, “All our troubles in life come because we cannot sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.” Do we use our children as an excuse? They can be taught the value of stillness. I know a family from Phoenix who had a quiet hour every afternoon – with almost a dozen children in the house. The parents went to their room. The older children helped the younger ones be still. They read, drew pictures, played quiet solitary games. I saw this year after year in an exuberant household and never forgot it.

8. Slow down and live more leisurely.

Our life is characterized by speed: fast foods, fast cars, high-speed internet, instant noodles, instant communication. We tend to hurry, but why? I once read on a restaurant menu, “Good food takes time.” Good anything takes time: food, friendship, meditation, worship. Slowing down means nurturing the spirit of leisure, which David Steindl-Rast O.S.B. says is “not the privilege of those who have time but the virtue of those who take time.” He also (or was it another of my mentors?) described leisure as “making time for what’s important” and “celebrating what’s too good to be used.” How will we know what’s good and important to us if we don’t slow down enough to consider it? “Plant a carrot and watch it grow,” taught an old wise woman. If you garden, you know that a carrot doesn’t grow like a weed!

9. Break the pattern of the day with poetry and play.

Life is full of quotidian tasks that bog us down: cleaning the house, paying bills, preparing the umpteenth meal. Even our most cherished daily rhythms can become dehumanizing routines, our good ruts worse than our bad ruts. Novelist Walker Percy called this “the grip of everydayness.” The Desert Fathers and Mothers called it acedie, sloth, “the noonday devil” that plagues even the holiest monk. We need to discern when to maintain the order of our days with discipline and when to break the pattern of our days. What can we do differently or more adventurously? Write a poem or do a finger painting? Put on music and dance? Make an exotic new omelet? If you regularly get up early in the morning, then luxuriously sleep late. If you get up later, then rise earlier and discover the dawn. Jesus urged us to become like little children. Becoming like children means playing like them. Am I capable of childlike play? Or am I “driven by a neurotic compulsion to work in a utilitarian society that makes everything useful,” as columnist Walter Kerr once asked? I used to wonder how I could fit more leisure into my busy life. Now I ask, how does a woman of leisure get her work done? Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, “Madness is the grain of salt that keeps good sense from rotting.” Breaking the pattern of my day with poetry and play is the grain of salt that keeps my good Rule of Life from rotting!

10. Celebrate Sabbath.

In the mid-1970s, I realized I was chronically violating God’s commandment to “keep holy the Sabbath” by using it to catch up on the work that frequently overwhelmed me. (I’m Christian, so my Sabbath is Sunday. It may be another day for you, by personal choice or religious tradition.) To break this bad habit, I read Abraham Heschel’s jewel of a book on the Sabbath. I felt so ashamed of myself and so inspired by the Jewish tradition of Shabat, I changed my ways. Heschel taught me the real relationship between my work week and Sabbath rest: I am “not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of work…. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.” How do I celebrate Sabbath now? I sleep in. I rest. I don’t wear my pedometer and count my steps but stroll leisurely. I’ve revived the tradition of “Sunday dinner.” I pray, play, and create a work of art out of the hours from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday. I “waste” the day because the day is “too good to be used.”

I came up with these ten rhythms after many years of trial and error. They form a solid foundation for any deep contemplative life, whether you live  in a monastery or out in the hurly-burly of the world.