COMMENTARY: The three-to-five-minute exercise can be life-changing.
There is something both liberating and disorienting about summer. The school year carries me. It’s not always graceful, but the structure is there: the early mornings, the carpool, the rhythm that tells me where I am in the day.
When summer arrives and that rhythm stops, I don’t feel liberated so much as disoriented. A loose schedule, it turns out, is not a more spacious one. It’s often just a different kind of chaos.
Maybe you know the feeling.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe: The moment our routine cracks open is actually the best moment to plant something new inside it. And this summer, I want to suggest one small, ancient and genuinely transformative practice that can change the shape of your interior life if you let it. It’s called the examination of conscience. Catholic tradition calls it the examen. It takes three to five minutes before you go to sleep. And it has a way of quietly changing everything.
The Desert Fathers practiced it. St. Augustine practiced it. St. Ignatius of Loyola placed it at the center of his Spiritual Exercises. St. Josemaría Escrivá returned to it
