This free YouTube documentary from Only Human, has a journalist step into an Indiana state prison to interact with 12 Death Row prisoners. The documentary is 46 minutes long and worth watching.
Around the 18-minute mark(timestamped in the video above), the host interviews a prison-house barber, known as Rick The Barber. Rick is serving three life sentences plus 10 years for kidnapping and robbery. He started his sentence in January of 1975.
The host remarked, “You’ve been here since the 70’s, that’s a long time.”
Rick The Barber answered, “You do it a day at a time. Sometimes an hour at a time, sometimes a minute at a time, whatever it takes to get through.”
This is how you get through any difficult endeavor. One at a time. The “one” will be different depending on the difficulty and the circumstance. One day, one minute, one second at a time.
Getting through difficulty “one” at a time applies across domains of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Your “one at a time” can be different each time you need to get through something difficult.
Sometimes you have to get through it one breath at a time. This is meditation.
A difficult yoga stretch, being choked in jujitsu, panicking during a test, or the death of a loved one: When you’re in the throes of suffering, you get through it “one” at a time.
When you’re thinking one hour, or one minute at a time, you’re looking at the clock. Avoid this by pursuing mastery that consumes your focus. Sometimes bodily, mental, or spiritual pain takes you away from mastery; this is when you break your time into smaller portions to make the passage of time easier to digest, no different than cutting food into smaller pieces before eating.
While we can’t say this for certain, we assume barbering helped Rick The Barber do his time more than anything else. It was strong enough to become his name and his identity. Inside concrete walls he cannot leave, Rick The Barber found a path to mastery.
The path is waiting for all of us.
When your mind is out of your control and pain is in control, give control of your mind to a mantra. It can be easier to take over control of your mind from a mantra than it is from pain.
