Traffic Control

Every hour, on the hour, a chime would sound through the building. And everyone — wherever they were, whatever they were doing — would simply stop.

One minute. That's all it was. No instructions beyond that. Just stand or sit exactly where you are, take a breath, and notice. The room. Your body. The moment you were actually standing in, rather than the six you were thinking about.

I first met this at a Brahma Kumaris retreat in Oxford, a weekend a friend had pointed me toward. They call it Traffic Control. And for someone who'd spent years working in youth homelessness — days built entirely around keeping going, holding it together for people who needed you to — it felt almost absurdly simple. A minute. Once an hour. Surely that couldn't be the thing.

But it was the thing.

Nobody had ever asked me to stop on the hour before. Not once, in all that work, had anyone built in a moment simply to notice I was still there. You learn to push through instead. Keep the next task moving. Traffic Control asked the opposite of me — and it turned out to be the harder skill.

The building would go quiet for exactly sixty seconds. Then the chime would fade, and everyone would simply pick back up where they'd left off, as if nothing had happened. Except something had. A tiny, deliberate gap, wedged into the middle of an otherwise unbroken day.

I still try to find that gap now, in whatever rough version fits my actual life. No chime through a building. No sixty synchronised strangers pausing with me. Just a minute, somewhere in the day, where I stop and notice I'm here.

It's a strange kind of practice — measured in the smallest possible unit. Sixty seconds. And somehow that's enough.