The alarm goes off at the same time it always does. There is no reason to make today any different.
I move through it the way I move through any morning. The workout, the stretching, the meditation and pen on the page. Then, I drink the coffee.
But somewhere in there, I make room.
It isn't a ceremony or a moment of silence I announce to myself. It's a stretch held a little longer than it needs to be, a pause in the journal before the next sentence or a swallow of coffee that takes its time. Somewhere in those small spaces, they come in.
You have your own version of this, whether you know it or not. Maybe it is a face or a name on a wall in a town you drove through once. Maybe it's your grandfather's photograph on a shelf you walk past every day without really looking. Maybe it is the empty seat at your family's table that no one mentions but everyone notices. Maybe it is the flag on the corner you have stopped seeing.
Today is for the ones who didn't come home; the ones whose mornings ended somewhere else, whose alarms went off for the last time in a country that wasn't theirs, or a hospital ward, or a base on the other side of an ocean from anyone who loved them. The ones whose families learned a new way to live without them.
The ones I knew make space for the ones I didn't. The names I carry make space for the names I never learned. Every porch in every town where someone is doing some version of what I am doing. Every empty chair at every kitchen table.
You may not know any of them by name. You almost certainly know one of them by absence. The uncle nobody talks about. The high school classmate a few years ahead of you that never came home. The neighbor's son. The girl from the unit your buddy was in. The grandfather you only know from a folded flag in a glass case.
I don't speak their names; what I do instead is let them in. I let them stay as long as they want. The ones I knew and the ones I owe. The Hindu Kush and Normandy and the Chosin Reservoir and the Mekong and Fallujah. The uniforms changed with each war and the names of the wars changed too, but the weight of those last mornings never did.
The minute doesn't bring anyone back and It doesn't settle any debts. It doesn't make the day mean more than it already means. It reminds you that the morning you are moving through, the coffee you are about to drink, the day you are about to spend, was paid for. Not by you or by anyone you will meet today. but by someone whose last morning looked nothing like this one.
Somewhere, people in this country are firing up the grill, pulling the cooler out of the garage, and arguing about traffic. I don't begrudge it.
But before the smoke rises and the cooler opens and the first beer is cracked, give them a minute. There's no ceremony required; just a minute inside the morning you're already in. A stretch held a little longer. A pause between sentences. A swallow of coffee that takes longer than a swallow of coffee should take.
That is worth a minute of your time.