Mondays

I am always fascinated by periodicity and habit. I worked for decades as a nurse at night and on weekends. Like a vampire, I slept during the day and arose at dusk. My work week was likely to start on a Friday evening and end at 7 AM on a Monday morning. For some years, I worked two evening-night shifts, 16 hours, on two consecutive weekdays at a nursing job. I kept a small antiques business going on the other days of the week. I was busy.

My sense of a week was altered, unconventional, to say the least. Maintaining relationships fell to me more than to those friends and lovers who worked in the conventional 9-to-5 world. My schedule was always seen as a hassle, an encumbrance, in those relationships. I stopped apologizing for my work week early on. I knew I was doing valuable work in nursing. I also knew my work was taken for granted by society, including my own social network. That came with the choice to do it. The antiques business was fun, but also necessary to supplement my low wages in nursing at that time.

The up side of these challenges of scheduling was my learning to not suffer fools in my social life. I took my friendships seriously. They required foresight and planning on my part. If a person could not appreciate my efforts, I soon sought different company. I also made sure to recognize the efforts of the rare person with a day job who might meet for coffee before work as I was getting out of work. 

My retired life has returned me to the day-worker world in many ways. I sleep at night. I am awake relatively early in the morning. I schedule my time like a day-worker. Morning, lunch, afternoon, supper. There is regularity in my days and weeks. This brings me to Mondays.

Mondays are the measure of my happiness in this world of regularity. Until recently, I looked forward to Mondays. A new week, unburdened by fatigue and unpleasant sequels to stressful days. My weeks had an easy rhythm. Good dietary habits, walking, time at the gym, meditating, writing, etc..

For the past two months, I have been supervising work on my house by contractors. I am up early. I remove my car from the driveway to accommodate vans, trucks and dumpster deliveries. The house hosts a symphony of pneumatic hammers, crowbars, dropped pipe wrenches and power saws. I am immersed in the work weeks of others. This has not easily been incorporated into my practice. It has also made maintaining my happiness a greater challenge at times.

I realized yesterday evening, a Sunday, that I was anxious. Another week of the schedule of others approached. Once again I find myself accommodating the work week of those whose rhythm is more conventional. And this time I am paying for the privilege. Sometimes the results of the work seem inadequate to me.

Whatever compassion I develop comes from these reflections. Compassion, as I know it, does not come from high-minded philosophy. Compassion comes from social engagement and opening the mind to the experience of other life forms. My struggles with time and relationships has broadened my understanding of the differences in vocational lives from one person to another. My struggles with my own body when dealing with nocturnal work have broadened my understanding of those whose lives are radically out of step with the conventional 9-to-5 world. 

I do not accept my own suffering as preordained or somehow just by the measure of an omniscient god.  It is the result of a choice or an accident of living. When it is a result of a personal choice, my practice entails accepting responsibility, initiating curative change and moving on to the pursuit of happiness. When my suffering is the result of a simple accident of living, like a disease or some trauma, my practice entails acknowledging the accidental nature of my own life, initiating whatever action I can to make things better and moving on to my pursuit of happiness. 

So, Blue Mondays are simply a matter of accelerated practice. Acknowledging the challenge is the first step. Centering on my values and my own process before addressing the momentary challenges of the impact of other lives on my own builds compassionate and generous interaction with my environment, despite my stress and normal human emotions. Understanding that the imposed periodicity of a work week is simply a human contrivance to get things done does help. Divorcing my identity from the work and its problems allows me to be the person I wish to be no matter how distasteful the situation.