A 1921 essay.
A hard year.
A small app I built
so I could keep breathing.

A while back, my job ended on a phone call that lasted less time than it takes to make coffee. The economy did what economies do, the company did what companies do, and on a Tuesday afternoon I closed a laptop that wasn't mine anymore.

I would not have called it a crisis. I would have called it a schedule change. By the third week my chest had decided to live somewhere up near my throat, and the schedule change had begun calling me back at three in the morning to make sure I was awake.

The training

Around that time I was finishing a Dale Carnegie course. I'd signed up half-curious, half-skeptical, expecting a workshop on public speaking. It turned out to be one of the most challenging and transformative things I'd ever put myself through. Weeks of standing up in front of strangers who slowly stopped being strangers. I came out the other side with a different posture in the world, and a small group of people I still think about.

Somewhere in the middle of the course they handed us a copy of a book of Carnegie's I'd never heard of: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The cover looked like something you'd find on the windowsill of a rental cabin. I started reading it anyway, at three a.m., because the only other option was my own thoughts.

The phrase

A few chapters in, Carnegie quoted an old daily program. He attributed it to a woman named Sibyl F. Partridge. Later I'd learn the same words showed up in a newspaper column by a writer called Frank Crane, back in 1921. Either way, it had been around longer than my problems had.

Just for today I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once. I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime.

That was the entire fix. Not forever. Not from now on. Twelve hours. The poem goes on for nine more paragraphs and it never raises its voice. One line, near the end, stayed with me longer than the rest:

Just for today I will be unafraid — especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, and to believe that those I love, love me.

Day-tight compartments

Carnegie has a phrase for what the poem is doing. He calls it living in day-tight compartments. Close yesterday's door. Don't open tomorrow's. Live in the twenty-four hours that are actually in front of you, and let the rest stay where it is.

It sounds simple because it is simple. It also sounds simple because you haven't tried to do it yet at three a.m.

The build

I started writing things down. A small intention in the morning. A word for how I felt. A thing I'd been grateful for, even on the days when the only honest answer was “coffee.”

A paper notebook would have been enough. But there were six small practices I wanted to be reminded of, every day, gently, in the right order, and I wanted them on the same device that already had most of my attention. So I built the app I wanted to use.

Every feature in Just for Todayhas a paper behind it. I tried to choose practices where the science was old enough to have stopped arguing with itself — affect labeling, expressive writing, gratitude journaling, Carnegie's structured worry method. If a thing didn't have a study, it didn't make it in.

Carnegie's method, as a screen you can use at three a.m.

The symbol

The mark on the app is not mine. It belongs to a Lithuanian designer named Giedrius, who released it as an open-source “symbol for mindfulness” around 2012. The vertical droplets are time — past and future, both illusions. The horizontal ripples are space. The single point in the middle is where you live.

I used it because it's exactly the picture I'd draw of what the app is supposed to do, and because the designer asked people to use it.

Today

The panic is gone. The phrase is not. Most mornings I open the app I made, write a sentence about the day I'd like to have, and put the phone back down. Sometimes the day I'd like to have is “get through the day.” That counts.

If you're reading this from inside something hard, I'm not going to promise this app will fix it. It didn't fix me — I had to do the rest of that work somewhere else, with people. But the six small practices in here, done badly, for five minutes, on a day you don't feel like doing them — those will move something. I have a lot of evidence for that, both in the studies and in my own life.

Just for today. That's all it asks.

— Raí

The poem “Just for Today” appears in Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), where it is attributed to Sibyl F. Partridge. An earlier version was published by Frank Crane in the Boston Globe in 1921. The mindfulness symbol is open source, designed by Giedrius, Lithuania, c. 2012.