The discipline of the small

A page a day is three hundred and sixty-five pages a year. A photograph a day is a record of a life. Ten minutes of reading before bed is more books than most people read.

The arithmetic is not the point. The point is that smallness is a strategy for continuing. It removes the excuse that there is not enough time, and it removes the drama that makes a missed day feel like a failed life.

What small practices do best is make the ordinary visible. Not the achievement, but the accumulation. A year of small things is not a small year.