There’s something beautifully disruptive about Thich Nhat Hanh’s words: “Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there.”
In a culture that constantly tells us the sacred lives somewhere else — in a church service, a conference, a mountaintop moment, a viral post — he gently insists that holiness has been hiding in plain sight all along. Not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary. Not in the applause, but in the attention.
We’ve been trained to divide our lives into categories: spiritual and secular, meaningful and mundane, holy and ordinary. We imagine that God, or meaning, or depth, or transcendence only shows up when the lighting is right and the music swells. But Thich Nhat Hanh dissolves that false boundary. The sacred is not a location; it is a way of seeing. The difference between a chore and a sacrament is not the task itself, but the presence we bring to it.
Sweeping the floor can be resentment or it can be gratitude. Washing dishes can be hurry or it can be prayer. Watering vegetables can be obligation, or it can be participation in life itself. The act does not change, but we do. When we are mindful, fully there, aware of our breath, aware of the gift of water, the miracle of growth, the privilege of having a home to clean — the ordinary becomes luminous. The moment becomes charged with quiet reverence.
This feels especially urgent in our time. We are distracted to the point of fragmentation. Notifications tug at us. News cycles agitate us. Outrage monetizes our attention. Even our spirituality can become performative. Something we post rather than practice. We scroll through life instead of inhabiting it. And then we wonder why we feel disconnected, anxious, unmoored.
Mindfulness is resistance.
To be fully present while sweeping the floor is to refuse the lie that your worth depends on productivity. To wash dishes slowly, attentively, is to reject the myth that your life is somewhere else — later, bigger, more impressive. To notice the warmth of water, the rhythm of your breath, the simple goodness of soap and ceramic and sunlight through a window is to reclaim your humanity in a system that profits from your distraction.
For those of us shaped by Christian language, this resonates deeply. Brother Lawrence called it “practicing the presence of God” while working in a monastery kitchen. The mystics spoke of finding God in all things. Jesus himself spent most of his life in obscurity, building tables, walking dusty roads, eating simple meals. If God could inhabit carpentry, perhaps holiness was never meant to be rare.
For The Gracist Project, this matters. Grace is not only about how we treat others in heated conversations or political disagreements, though it certainly shows up there. Grace is also how we treat the present moment. Do we rush through it, critique it, compare it? Or do we receive it as a gift? Showing ourselves grace means allowing this moment, however unremarkable to be enough. It means not demanding that every minute be spectacular in order to be sacred.
When we begin to see every minute as potentially holy, something shifts in us. Our anxiety softens because we are not chasing a better future. Our resentment loosens because we are not grading every task by its glamour. Our relationships deepen because we are actually there — not half-scrolling, half-listening, half-living.
The floor still needs sweeping. The dishes still need washing. The vegetables still need watering. The emails still need answering. But mindfulness transforms these from interruptions into invitations. Invitations to breathe. Invitations to notice. Invitations to participate in the quiet miracle of being alive.
Perhaps holiness is not rare at all. Perhaps it is simply overlooked.
Every minute can be sacred. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is real. And if we dare to show up to it fully, we may discover that the life we have been waiting for has been unfolding in front of us the entire time.
Patrick Carden
