Meditation for December 1st
Tuesday is the Only Day One Can Live in the Moment
One common factor among self-help, religious, and spiritual practices is living in the moment. If you dwell too much on the past, you wake up in regret and shame, wishing you could have done things differently, or on your future trip, and get wrapped up in anxiety about all the unknowns. Most days are hard to stay in the moment, but there is one day a week that it is easier than others to live in the moment, and that is Tuesdays.
If you don’t work Monday through Friday, then you’re a weirdo, and this meditation won’t make sense.
Wednesday
I believe the shamans in Mongolia refer to Wednesdays as “hump day” because it is the very middle of the week. Wednesday is when people get anxious about the week ending. They can see Friday in their near future, but Monday is not far behind. And the week is all downhill from here.
Thursday
OMG! Tomorrow is Friday! How can anyone pay attention to the moment when tomorrow is Friday?!? Thursday, or, as it’s commonly called, Friday’s Eve in the office, makes it really hard to be in the moment when the last day of the workweek is tomorrow.
Friday
It is impossible to focus on the moment until clocking out time, and then it’s either trying to create a really good time or trying to recreate a reasonable time from when one was young. As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to stay out late, and since opening bands don’t really start sometime between 9:30 and 10:30, we start going out less and just going to bed at a reasonable time.
Saturday
This day has to be a few things:
- Productive – this is the day to do errands, yard work, pick up around the place, etc…
- Fun – Saturday needs to be filled with fun. After the productivity sesh, the goal is to have a perfect, unforgettable experience.
- Relaxing – the week at work has been stressful, trying to get to this day, so it needs to be relaxing. After productivity and fun, nothing needs to happen.
- Balance – if there is too much productivity, then Monday will suck extra hard because you didn’t get to relax. Too much fun and the laundry didn’t get done, and too much relaxation leads to a hopeless depression that only the sweet release of death can fix.
Sunday
This is where the relaxing morning blends into the terrifying afternoon/evening, where the very near future, Monday, begins to creep up. Your weekend is disappearing, and all the anxiety, fears, concerns, and dread of work take over. Maybe try to go to sleep early, but the stress keeps you up as you picture that one email you’ll have to write over and over, and you keep picturing sending it with a huge mistake… oh god, the alarm is going off, it’s…
…Monday
Do you remember what you did on the weekend? Everyone spends Monday telling their coworkers what they did that weekend. They go over the Sunday TV shows that everyone watched to escape the very horrors of their mundane lives. They see the long week ahead of them, and it seems impossible that you will be able to get through it. Friday is an eon away, but suddenly wishing it was the weekend is making time go by too fast, and suddenly, you are just getting old faster than you are comfortable with.
Tuesday
This is the only day that most people can live in the moment. They don’t have anything more to say about last weekend, and it is too far away from next weekend to dwell on it, so all one can do is keep their head down and do the next right thing. Most people have made their lunches, so most restaurants aren’t overly busy. No one seems rushed or impatient. Everyone seems resigned to a day that means nothing for anyone’s instant gratification. So on Tuesday, most people in the US are just being in the now, unwittingly living in the moment.
Monday Holidays
Of course, when a holiday closes banks on Monday like Labor Day, Tuesday becomes a Monday, but it is different because there are only four days in the week, so the pining for next weekend begins immediately, so there is no “Tuesday” that week. The weekend is spent having a bigger event like camping or some shit like that, so it was basically working. How many people come back to work after a long weekend, saying they need a vacation for the vacation?
Holiday on other days
Sometimes holidays are in the middle of the week, or even on Fridays. This means that you have to work at least four days. Still, most people take Christmas Eve off and will probably leave early on the 23rd if they even work that week at all. Still, New Year’s is the very next week, so you don’t want to blow your holiday wad on just the Christmas birthday, but you’ll need the extra time to recoup from the enormous amounts of alcohol consumption you’ll do on the eve.
The holiday becomes this forced, contrived festival, and therefore, one is really unable to experience the present moment at all. The very capitalistic culture of the holidays negates that.
The “untraditional” work week
More and more people are working untraditional workweeks. The service and retail world doesn’t get weekends or holidays off. Only a few lucky people get to experience holidays with their families, but really, they are running to the mall on Thanksgiving now, so now more people don’t get that holiday off anymore. Stores are banking on convenience for the people who put things off till the last minute, so now people have to be at work on holidays instead of being at home with their families.
If you are dealing with customers on Friday, they will tell you to have a good weekend, but they are just rubbing it in that they get the weekend off, and you don’t. You’ll be stuck behind a register while all your friends are at the river, skiing, or whatever people with weekends off do.
Take Tuesday off. As you walk around, you’ll notice people a lot more in the moment and way more accepting of things. Tuesday is the most spiritual day of the week.