Taking back Saturday
Working 5 days a week brings with it a number of imperatives, not the least of which (now that is a clumsy turn of phrase) is that the 2 days a week we call the weekend become more precious…
My first big mistake, moving from 3 days in the office to 5 days in the office, was to decide that I would get up early on Saturday morning and work. A sleep in for an hour would have me rising at 7:00am instead of 6:00 am and that would give me a sense of weekend. (I’ll look back on this and laugh, please tell me I will). Then I could go for a quick walk, take a shower, eat my muesli, percolate and sip my coffee and be at my desk by 8:30am, ready for a full day of work. My one concession - a nap in the afternoon.
A wonderful revelation this morning, that giving up brings its own rewards. After another 5 days that ended with me on Friday so exhausted as to be unable to put one foot in front of the other, I decided to go to the gym on Friday night and make no commitments to get out of bed on Saturday morning.
First, I should probably explain the gym thing.
I’m not really sure about the technicalities, but have picked up enough jargon over the past 5 years, since I first attended a gym. What you might call brain chemistry seems to change when you exercise regularly. I’ve just started a job that’s got lots of stuff going on. Lots o’ stuff. [is there a competition for understatement of the year?] plus dealing with the strange demands of the journal known as extempore; more of that in another post. The whole thing is dragging me down. I don’t get to go out to listen to music half as much as I’d like. I’m always tired. I am losing energy and enthusiasm. The gym helps give some of that energy back. A combination of gym and live improvised music is guaranteed to lift me out of drudgery, but I can’t find the energy to do the latter without spending some time and effort on the former. So it’s gym Friday night and out for some sounds on Saturday…
I got up at 10:00 after reading the arts sections in The Age and The Australian, drinking a cup of coffee in bed and indulging in some bonding time with a certain kitty kat who thinks having the human at home just means an extra dimension of napping pleasure. Stealing body warmth and nesting your kitty kat chin in the crook of the human’s elbow is so much better than curling up on your own on the mohair blanky.
The guilt of not achieving anything has not kicked in because I had not planned to get up at 7:00. When I finally got to my desk, it was after a real sleep-in, a walk to the newsagent and a movie. As I write this, I’ve achieved quite a bit already. There is washing in the machine, a stew on the stove, three emails written, a telephone call made, the page layout for Issue 3 filled in a bit more than it was yesterday… and I’ve also managed somehow to reclaim my Saturday morning. There’s got to be a mantra in that somewhere. Something about letting go?
Either way, 5 days a week is a mug’s game. Seriously. Why do we do it?