Happy Sunday! I am enjoying a long weekend away from the hustle and bustle of work. There is a saying, “We live for the weekends.” It’s a sad saying, don’t you think? It implies that there is something wrong with weekdays; something less than about them in our minds.
Yes, I get the gist of it. Weekdays are the days we toil to survive, so that when we clock out on Fridays we have our own time to savor the fruits of our labor.
We jam our weekends full of activities that we don’t have time for during the week. We play. We visit friends and loved ones. We have parties. We take lazy afternoons naps. We spend time in nature, sun on our face, grass or sand between our toes. We wear our comfortable clothes. We recharge so we can do it all again; the toiling. It’s a never-ending cycle. Some would say, a rut. But that is life.
An average lifetime of 80 years is 4171 weeks. That’s 4171 weekends. That’s only 200,228 hours. In a world of millions, billions, and trillions. It is a speck. It hardly seems enough. It’s not. Especially when we dismiss the other five days of the week as less than. As days we must toil through so that we can “live” for two.
As I reflect on this week’s ReVerse I am reminded that a day is a day is a day. Mondays are not horrible task-mastering beasts. Tuesdays are not extensions, the lesser beasts of Monday. There is no hump, no pinnacle defining moment about Wednesdays, and Thursdays are not 11th hour, line drives into finish, to Fridays. There is nothing magical about Fridays. Or weekends for that matter.
This realization, this eureka moment buys me back a bit more time if I recognize that each moment counts. 29200 days, 700800 hours, 42,048,000 minutes, 2,522,880,000 seconds. Aside from the fact that by buying into the myth of weekends, I have squandered so many of those moments, it is still not enough. Here on the cusp of my 61st year I have maybe 599184000 moments left, give or take, which means I have a bit of catching up to do if I’m going to live for each moment, not just the weekend.
But the good news for me, for all of us, is that if we pay attention, if we are present in the moment at hand, it can hold a lifetime’s worth of blessings. Good things do come in small packages. I finally understand eternity. It is not looking back eons with the regrets that loom, it’s not looking forward, as we tend to do when we think of eternity, as something unreachable “out there”. No. Eternity is NOW exploding in all directions, brilliant and breathtaking. I need only remind myself to breathe and I am there.
Have a wonderful week!
Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 28 May 2017
what are you doing
better than bagging groceries
that says, “love of mine, remember me”, the dark, the light, fierce honesty, authenticity.
it has potential
acting out as an adult years later,
conspirators cackling
fools seek miracles
Inspirations, oft’ Kitschy,
wide eyes and windows
she gave her head
they want your freedom
…quiet it all by filling your
head with daydreams
~kat
A shi sai or ReVerse poem is a summary poem with a single line lifted from each entry of a collection of work over a particular timeframe and re-penned in chronological order as a new poem. Unlike a collaborative poem, the shi sai features the words of one writer,providing a glimpse into their thoughts over time. I use it as a review of the previous week.
