Morning prayers don’t have to be long. Thirty honest seconds beats ten distracted minutes.

Length is not the measure of attention, and the two often work against each other. A long session you spend mostly elsewhere teaches you that the practice is a chore to be survived, while something brief and genuinely meant stays alive. Honesty is the ingredient that cannot be substituted. Duration is the one people mistake for it.

Make it small enough to survive a bad morning: a few sentences before you get out of bed, in whatever words are true at the time. Skip the performance and say the real thing. Half a minute of that is enough to keep the habit alive.