Most weeks during the year I find myself dreading Sundays. Since I find myself working six out of seven days a week many months of the year, Sunday is the only day where I can pretend to relax, where I can spend a little time by myself for myself. While I would love to laze around for the entire day, instead I usually find myself preparing for the week ahead, scoring assignments, creating new materials for my classes, and accomplishing the tasks that I do not usually have time for throughout the rest of the week. Running through these frantic exercises each week as I struggled to decide what I wanted to write about this week to relieve my stress prompted me to ask myself: What are Sundays even for? Related to the question is one asking what they should be for, and it has taken me many years to discover and decide that Sundays are for the future; they are the one time that we can figure out, build, and create ideas that are meant to exist now and in the future.
In an ideal world, the future would unfold one day at a time through the actions we do in our daily lives. One of the curiosities of our modern society seems to be that we live much of our lives in the proverbial survival mode that governed our long-ago ancestors. We have to make it through this day, this week, or this month, and things will be better sometime in the eventuality. Even though that slower future almost never comes, we still hope for it nonetheless and convince ourselves that we can survive until we make it so. This manner of thinking takes a toll even after just a short period of time, but it does not have to be the only way we spend the end of our weekends. I am not sure that I would argue that the hour I spend at the grocery store on Sunday to secure enough food for another week would qualify as “survival activities” when others fight much more difficult battles than I to live. Yet living like this does wear away at a person until strain becomes the only certainty that links one week to the next.
I spent last week—our Spring Break that always seems to arrive right before every single one of the people, systems, and dreams we hold close to ourselves is about to collapse in a radiant inversion of what is left of reality—thinking with friends and family. Although this time reinforced the echoes I kept hearing of events happening in my life, it also reminded me of the renewed vigor that writing seems to give me in my life. I write every single day, but I do write significantly more on Sundays than I do on other days if only because I have more time to do so. Sometimes I have to scratch notes down on the sheets of paper where I keep my to-do lists for the day in order to remember everything I want to include in my texts. I find many different reasons to write, from fictional projects that I create to carry my soul to professional work that I put off too long to posts like this where I might be able to join more than one of these categories, and I find ways to discover things through the work. It is this final truth about figuring things out via writing that I believe we should reserve Sundays for finding. Some people make these reflections in places of worship or through other means of service, and I think writing these thoughts in whichever way makes sense to me adds something pleasant to my Sunday so that these days do not trouble me quite as much as they did in the past. I used to feel so much shame that I experienced much of the same dread that the entire world feels at the approach of another work week that my feelings paralyzed me to the point where I could get almost nothing done. Shifting my focus from what I needed to get done to what I wanted to make time to write about made anything I managed to accomplish irrelevant and unworthy of my attention. Another way that I have learned to communicate this idea is that the work will be there the next day or the next, and the world will not fall apart if I wait one more day to do that work.
I know everyone’s Sundays look a little different, and even my Sundays rarely look the same from week to week. Some people reserve Sundays for worship and praise, while others spend the time vegetating in serenity during the only time when something is not outwardly expected of them from their workplace or society. Spending just an hour on Sunday seeking the future through writing might supersede some of our more immediate concerns and subordinate them beneath a dream that can keep us looking towards our foggy future. I started this post from one of my usual roosts where I think it has been too long since I wrote and shared something, and it was only through the process of writing out these and other thoughts that I was able to arrive at this conclusion. Just a few weeks ago I reminded my composition students of kairos as a rhetorical element that they could use in their own projects, but it would have been wonderful if I had thought to connect my practices on Sunday to the concept. A twisted sense of kairos also urges me to not rush to release a piece until I know that it will hit the right note at the right time, which sometimes delays my sharing of something until the world feels ready instead of waiting until I feel ready. I implore others that I know who write to build themselves the experiential contexts that will lead to realizations that they want to write about so that they can feel this same feeling as an urge to liberate their ideas. In other words, others should build their weeks to allow for a day of composing—in all senses of the word—and figuring out what our compositions mean. Sundays are for thinking, and I hope to do plenty of thinking in the weekend ahead.
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