"Blessings are asked at beginnings and endings, and at many points in between. Indeed, any time we feel a situation or a person needs the benefit of divine providence, we ask for blessing. This is how we normally understand a blessing in our culture. It's an invocation of the presence and power of the sacred upon a person's life or upon the function of an object.

"We normally don't bless in the middle of our work day at the office or on the factory floor, especially if the boss has just given us an extra assignment. We don't bless while sitting in a traffic gridlock. We don't bless while watching television or sitting in a movie theater. We don't ordinarily stop and invoke a blessing in the midst of our lovemaking (though the act itself may be a blessing), or while playing baseball, or cooking dinner, or mixing a martini. And when we're laughing in the sheer delight of a moment, we probably don't ask for a blessing then, either.

"In short, in the midst of the boring times, the happy times, the angry times, and the routine times, performing a blessing may be the last thing on our minds. In the midst of the ordinary and the trivial, we tend not to think of the power of the sacred or the presence of the unobstructed world.

"But like the orange juice that is not just for breakfast anymore, blessings need not only be for special occasions. A blessing can be anytime we wish to make a deeper connection with the life (and lives) around us. As much as it is an invocation, it's also an act of discovering the part of us that moves in harmony on the dance floor of creation. In fact, the art of blessing is not only about the act of blessing but about an attitude towards the world, a way of seeing things that goes beyond our ordinary perceptions."

To Practice: Say more blessings, particularly during boring and routine times.

David Spangler in Blessing: The Art and the Practice