Ten minutes, one chair or one bed, and a voice that asks you to start the day the way a good musician tunes before the set: slowly, on purpose, listening for the note underneath the noise. That is the premise of "Just for Today," a guided visualisation published by Tom Evans in January 2021 and presented alongside a live watercolour painted by artist Siri Opli while the audio plays. The piece is built as a chain of short intentions, each opening with the same four words, each asking the listener to do one small, concrete thing. Breathe with attention. Question your thoughts. Hold anger like a hot coal and then put it down. Do one random kindness. Give thanks. Learn one new thing. Make one change. Evans frames the whole sequence as day one of a 21-day meditation retreat, and that framing is the key to reading it: this is not a lecture on enlightenment but a repeatable daily setup, designed to be done again tomorrow.
The structure is the first thing worth noticing. Each intention is a single, bounded commitment limited to the current day. That boundedness is deliberate. Most people who sit down to meditate are not failing because they lack vision; they are failing because the vision is too large to hold on a Tuesday at 7:40 a.m. A "just for today" instruction asks for twenty-four hours, not a lifetime, and it is small enough to actually keep.
The video opens by naming the logic plainly: "by and large the way that we start our day sets the tone for the rest of the day, so this short visualization is a great way to set up the most fantastic day ahead." The opening move is posture and attention, not belief. You sit or lie down, let the tension run out of your body, and let the mind "wander and to wonder." There is no performance required and no special equipment. The rest of the piece is a sequence of prompts that can be followed in almost any state of mind.
Breath comes first in nearly every contemplative tradition, and Evans's version is precise about where to aim the attention. He asks you to take "a deep in breath and a full out breath," then to notice the in-breath and the out-breath. Then comes the instruction that gives the practice its particular character: "most importantly pay attention to the still point between the in and the out and the out and the in."
That pause is the part most listeners skip, because it has no obvious content. It is the moment after the lungs fill and before they empty, and the moment after they empty and before they fill again. Asking attention to rest there is a different exercise from following the breath. Following the breath gives the mind a moving object. Resting at the turning point asks the mind to stay still while nothing dramatic happens, which is harder and, for many people, more revealing. If you have ever tuned an instrument by listening for the moment a string stops wavering, you already know the principle: stability is found in the gap, not the sound.
The second intention is the most unusual, and it is where the piece gets its bite. Evans asks you to be "aware of your thoughts as each thought comes in," and then to interrogate each one. "Ask it who sent it for what purpose." He goes further, asking what accent the thought speaks in, and who is doing the talking and who is doing the listening.
These questions do real work. A thought that arrives as if it were your own voice can be examined as a visitor with a particular origin and a particular agenda. Asking "who sent it" creates a small gap between the thought and the one who hears it. Asking about the accent is a sharper move: a voice that sounds like a parent, a critic, or an old schoolyard rival is easier to hear as a recording than as a fact. And the closing question, who is talking and who is listening, points toward the observer behind the commentary. You do not need to answer any of these questions in words. The point is to ask them with enough sincerity that the thought loosens its grip for a moment.
This is the kind of practice that rewards repetition. The first few times, the questions can feel theatrical. After a week, many people report that they catch a repeating thought, often the same one each morning, and recognize it as a habit rather than a verdict.
The intention on anger is the most vivid image in the piece. "Remember that holding anger is like holding a hot coal and not throwing it," Evans says, which turns a common emotional metaphor into something you can physically picture. Anyone who has held an actual ember knows the instinct is to drop it. Anger held for days, or replayed in the mind, is treated as if it were a possession. The coal image reframes it as something that burns the hand that carries it.
The remedy he offers is equally concrete. If thoughts of revenge or of having been wronged are present, "just imagine you're standing at the top of a cliff looking out to sea and throw that anchor as far away as you can let it sail into the air and drop into the sea." The anchor is a good choice of object. An anchor is what holds a boat in one place, and grievance often works the same way, keeping the self fixed to an old event. Throwing it into the sea is not a denial that the wrong occurred; it is a release of the grip. Visualisation is useful here because it gives the body a gesture to complete. The throw is the practice.
The kindness intention is short, but it contains a clear claim about how goodwill moves. "Perform a random act of kindness," the video instructs, and then it defines the terms: the act "must be random," and "the person bestow your kindness on may not be the person that returns the kindness to you." Smile at a stranger. Let someone into traffic. Hold a door.
The non-reciprocity is the interesting part. Much of ordinary social life runs on a ledger, in which favours are tracked and repaid. A random act breaks that ledger on purpose. You are not trying to get anything back from the person you help, and the act does not need to return to you to count. Evans adds a second observation that is easy to overlook: kindness is "nicely infectious." He describes what happens after the first gesture: "other people will copy you and pass them on." The practice is less about any single good deed than about the chain it starts.
The gratitude section stretches the frame wider than most daily intention lists would. Evans asks you to be thankful to "mother earth for keeping the air that you breathe around you and providing the gravity that sticks you to the planet." It is an unusual, slightly playful gratitude, because it names things that are almost never noticed. Air and gravity are the two conditions of life that are present in every moment and never invoiced. Thanking them is a way of attending to what is always already given.
The section then widens again, to "all the gifts and serendipities that come your way," and finally to "the amazing experience of being alive and self-aware on planet earth." That last phrase carries the whole piece's quiet ambition. Self-awareness is the faculty that lets you question thoughts, notice the breath, and choose kindness. Thanking yourself for having it is a way of treating awareness as the instrument it is.
The next two intentions form a pair. The first is to increase your knowledge: "learn the meaning of a new word, learn a new fact, pick up a new skill," and then "take that newness out into the world." Evans claims that doing so "opens new doors and brings new opportunities your way." The second intention extends that claim into behaviour. "The only constant is change," he says, so do something new, go somewhere new, meet somebody new, and "think something new and allow your world to change as a result."
Both ideas push against the habit of living on autopilot. A new word is a tiny expansion of the mind's vocabulary; a new route home is a tiny expansion of the map. The phrase "the only constant is change" is a familiar line, and Evans uses it not as a warning but as a permission. If the world is always moving, then small deliberate changes are not a betrayal of stability. They are simply participation in what is already happening.
The piece does not pretend that the day will be easy. The intention on possibility asks you to "keep a quiet mind and notice the signs and serendipities," and to "remember to say thank you when they come along." Then it addresses difficulty directly: "if any adversity comes your way say thank you too for bringing you a lesson and the opportunity to grow."
Saying thank you to adversity is the most demanding instruction in the sequence, and it is worth being honest about that. The line does not ask you to feel grateful for pain. It asks you to recognize that difficulty, once it has passed or while it is present, can carry information and room for growth. A reader who hears this as spiritual bypassing can keep the practice's more modest version: notice what the hard moment is teaching, without requiring that you enjoy it.
The closing intention is a question rather than a command, and it is framed explicitly as day one of a 21-day retreat. "Just imagine what would you like to stop doing," Evans asks, "and when you stop doing these things what activities could you replace these things with?" The question is practical. It turns a meditation into a small audit of habits, and it leaves the answer to the listener.
The last words are a compact three-part invitation: "be mindful, timeful and kindful as you go about your day." The coinage is characteristic. Mindful names attention. Timeful suggests using time with care, not hurrying through it. Kindful puts goodwill in the same grammatical family as the other two qualities, as something you can practise rather than simply feel. The piece ends where it began, with the day as the unit of practice.
The reason "Just for Today" holds up as a standalone practice is that it asks for very little and returns a clear sequence of acts. Each intention has a single verb you can perform: breathe, question, throw, smile, thank, learn, change, stop. The visualisations are concrete enough to imagine and short enough to repeat. The live watercolour that accompanies the video adds a second kind of attention, a slow visual process that matches the pace of the audio. Watching the paint settle is itself a small exercise in the still point the piece describes.
For readers who want to take it further, the practical method is simple. Choose one intention from the sequence for the coming week. Use it as your opening move each morning. Keep the scope to today. At the end of the day, notice which intention you remembered and which you forgot, and let that information shape tomorrow's choice. That is the 21-day retreat in its plainest form: not a grand transformation, but a day, repeated.
Start with the video itself. Ten minutes is enough for one full pass, and the watercolour gives you a second point of focus if the words feel abstract. Then try the breath instruction on its own for a few mornings, paying specific attention to the still point between the in-breath and the out-breath, before adding the thought questions. If you want a second anchor, pick the kindness intention and perform one unplanned act of goodwill a day, noticing whether it gets passed on.
Tom Evans's full catalogue of guided pieces is available on his site, at tomevans.co under the insight meditations section, where this visualisation sits alongside others in the same daily-practice format. The most useful next step is not to collect more material but to return to the same few intentions until they become familiar, and to see what a single day looks like when it is set up, on purpose, in the first ten minutes.
