I then set the timer on my phone for 15 minutes and do my best to let thoughts flow in and out of my mind. Some days I’m more successful at this practice than others.

This last Sunday I had two primary goals: to sit and meditate and to run a 5K distance. I did neither but still felt quite satisfied by the day’s end.

My sister-in-law suffers from pollen related allergies. She has to wear a mask anytime mows her yard. I had offered to mow for her this last weekend and wanted to get an early start. I rolled out of bed and immediately got dressed. After a nice weekend breakfast with my family, I loaded up the lawnmower and weed eater.

Shara’s yard isn’t large. I had the entire front and back mowed in less than an hour. During that hour I realized something. The regular walking in patterns of rows and squares allowed my mind to relax much as if I were at home sitting on my grandmother’s afghan. I was also getting a pretty good workout. My shoulders and forearms are still sore today.

When I finished with Shara’s yard, I offered to mow her neighbor’s as well. The neighbor’s husband has been away from home for awhile for work, and I figured her three kids kept her busy enough without her having to worry about the yard, too.

It felt good to help someone else out, but I also wanted to extend the thinking and workout time I had discovered.

It’s important for me to plan regular daily meditation and exercise, but life doesn’t always accommodate neat and regular scheduling. When my best laid plans get interrupted in the future, I’ll look around to see what opportunities exist for creative adjustments.

“Did you send that thing we talked about to Bill?”

“I loved the spicy stuff from that restaurant yesterday.”

I’m no prude. I fundamentally believe that cuss words are just words like any other. You won’t see me replacing a four-letter word with symbols because your brain is going to automatically fill in the rest of the word anyway. I cuss, however, when I’m too lazy or too hurried to find a better way to say what I really mean.

“I’ll be lucky if I can get all my shit done this afternoon and make it home in time for dinner at 6.”

Think of all the other ways that statement could be written.

“Three meetings and a proposal due to a client this afternoon. I’ll be lucky to get home on time today.”

Imprecision can can also cause complication in our lives. A conference call appointment at 3:30 seems straightforward enough unless you meant 3:30 CDT and your other attendees meant 3:30 EST.

Hemingway and Raymond Carver welded sparsely precise language to craft stories that have inspired and moved millions of readers. They understood that too many words could just as easily confuse a message as too few.

Someday I’d like to replicate their literary success. Today I’ll settle for clearly communicating with my friends, my family and my coworkers.

This was my second morning in a row of sitting before starting the rest of my day. I’ve tried various meditation habits over the years, and I’ve recently become inspired to begin the practice again thanks to the book Hardcore Zen. In it, Brad Warner writes that we shouldn’t sit zazen waiting for enlightenment to miraculously happen. Instead, the very act of sitting — of taking time every day to stare your existence in the face and try to better understand it — is enlightenment. In other words doing the work IS the reward.

So today was the second day of my new zazen practice, and it didn’t go quite as I had planned. Or did it? I planned to sit and be still for 15 minutes. I sat and was still for 15 minutes.

I did the work today. I plan to do the work tomorrow.

Each day I expect I will see different results. What matters most is that I do the work so each day I experience those results.

Partly because of their love of the indoors, and partly because Saturday was clear and 45 degrees after we saw two decent snowfalls in the same week, I decided we needed to get out of the house and enjoy some fresh air. I needed a new book to read and also had some fines to pay at the library so it seemed like the perfect destination.

We live pretty much in the middle of Fayetteville, which puts the library about 2.5 miles away from our house. This first seemed like a big distance for the kids to walk with me, but that is really only when I thought about it through the lens of our drive everywhere, go anywhere anytime always-on culture. I would love to give up one of our cars and walk or bike to work everyday. Walking an hour or two every day as part of a commute would eliminate the need to build-in workout time into my day.

Google maps said it would only take 45 minutes; it took the better part of an hour. The kids were great though. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but we did talk — without distraction. We looked at houses, trees and yards that we drive past everyday. While walking we noticed details and artifacts too hard to see when whizzing past at 35 MPH.

After we enjoyed hot chocolates and selected a few armloads of books,  my wife picked us up for the return trip home. Both kids were tired from the afternoon, but they both wanted to take another walk the next time we could. We had a great afternoon.

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

(Author: Ali Edwards)

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I’d been developing an on-again-off-again running routine throughout most of 2010. I did most of this work solo, but one sunny morning in the late summer/early fall my daughter Zoe joined me for the first time. She had asked to come along on previous runs, but I was either too rushed or running too far to accommodate her. On this morning, I picked a small route familiar to both of us from a yearly school fun run and out the door we went.

The sun instantly warmed our bodies as we stepped across the street and set a manageable pace. I set what I thought was a moderate pace, but Zoe got winded by the first big hill and asked to  walk. A slight breeze provided relief and we started running in short run/walk intervals.

“Let’s run from here to the yellow bush at the end of the corner,” I said.

“That’s far,” she replied.

“Not too far, and I know you can do it.”

We ran and talked, walked and talked. Most importantly we spent more one-one-one time together than we had in quite some time. We talked about nothing specific…school, volleyball practice and friends. I remember little of what we said but will always remember the time we spent saying it.

Some choose to connect with God in a church building on Sunday mornings. I find my connection running alongside my daughter on the paved streets and sidewalks of Fayetteville.

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1. I don’t get enough sleep. (Makes me foggy-headed.)
2. I don’t exercise enough. (Makes me foggy-headed.)
3. I watch too much TV. (Mis-prioritization of time.)
4. I procrastinate (laundry, dishes, plenty of other things.)

I can eliminate at any time all these things that keep me from writing. All it takes is being present and realizing that:

• sleeping is more important than watching another episode some TV show
• exercising and eating right set the foundation for every other activity in my day
• laundry, dishes and other chores will never go away
• distractions always exist
• simply focusing on the handful of important people and activities in my life brings me the most happiness

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Stress. Unfortunately, that one word dominates my impression of 2010. We began the year with a personal bankruptcy born out of two failed businesses and a mountain of resulting debt. Professional and personal doubts soon followed as Wendi and I struggled to redefine ourselves.

I devoted much of myself in the balance of this year to helping build a company called Collective Bias. As any entrepreneur can attest, birthing a new company is often exciting but rarely relaxing. Promising business leads and high-profile projects led to many a late night and long weekend.  I poured everything I had into my job this year and, in the long run, suffered for it.

As this year wore on, I realized how much of an imbalance I had in my life and took action to correct it. I started seeing a therapist and took deliberate efforts to create space in my head separate and apart from my work. Sleeping seven hours each night are now sacred to me, as is the time to connect with friends and loved ones from whom I had grown distant.

I’ve just recently started this most important work of rediscovering what is important to me. I’m not sure where it will take me in 2011 but I’m looking forward to staying present in the journey. At the end of 2011, I would love to sum up the year with the word Flow.

Reverb 10 is an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next. Use the end of your year as an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead. With Reverb 10 – and the 31 prompts our authors have created for you – you’ll have support on your journey.

I have 6 days left to respond to 31 writing prompts. That’s quite a challenge, especially since I return to work on Monday, but it seems like just the right exercise to jump start my contribution to this blog.

This grammatical phrase also serves as a pretty good description of where I stand in my life right now. I want my future to be more perfect because right now I’m too damn tense. All (alleged) humor aside, perfection is a tough goal to reach. Striving for perfection with an improper mindset can actually increase your stress. I have more work to do and more obligations to satisfy at home so I have to sleep less and do more to make everyone happy. I’ve tried that approach for going on three years now, and the only thing it accomplishes is the accelerated graying of my hair.

When the quest for perfection fails, the only thing left is steady, continuous improvement. At almost 38 years old, I have so many areas to improve, but I can address most with the following six activities.

• Sleep regularly
• Eat better
• Exercise often
• Write more
• Spend more time with my family and friends
• Simplify wherever possible

Nothing on this list seems all that difficult to accomplish, and yet I find myself sleep-deprived, out-of-shape, junk-food-fueled, overworked, undersocialized and generally stressed about the complexity of my life.

Work spills into home life often at the expense of regular sleep. Staying up late with my wife after the kids go to bed and waking up late because I’m not well-rested the next day keeps me too tired to exercise. Who really wants to eat better when there’s tasty restaurant food and snacks and desserts and drinks to be had at home and the office? I haven’t seen many of my closest friends in months. School, work and weekend activities work in concert to steal away the daysweeksyears we had planned for backyard barbecues and weekend football watch parties.

During times of great stress, I wonder just how I’ll affect something with this much momentum. It’s too big, too much and too overwhelming for me to fix.

The biggest revolution and the tiniest kindness all happen in exactly the same way — one step at a time. My path should be no different.