Who Decided My Week Belongs to Work?

It’s Sunday evening, a little after eight, and I’ve already written off the rest of the night.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with tonight. I’m not exhausted. I don’t have anything urgent to do. I could sit outside for another hour, watch a movie with my wife, or find something else to enjoy.

But tomorrow is Monday.

And apparently that’s enough for my mind to decide that Sunday is over.

I’ve done this for years. Somewhere along the way, I developed this unwritten rule that Monday through Friday belong to work. Those are the days I have to get through. Friday evening is when my life starts again.

The strange part is that nobody told me I had to live this way.

I have a buddy who goes to the gym at midnight during the workweek. Midnight! I can’t imagine doing that and then getting up for work the next morning.

But he does it.

Some people go to concerts on a Wednesday night. They go out to dinner, stay up late, see friends, and somehow manage to show up for work the following morning.

Meanwhile, I can find myself mentally shutting down at eight o’clock because I have to work tomorrow.

Why?

I’ve been thinking about that tonight.

Maybe I’ve spent so many years arranging my life around my job that I’ve forgotten something obvious.

These are still my days.

My employer gets the hours I’m paid to work. But somewhere in my head, I’ve been giving the job a whole lot more than that.

I’ve given it Sunday evenings. I’ve given it weeknights. Sometimes I’ve even given it part of Saturday because I’m already thinking about how quickly the weekend will disappear.

And I do it without anybody asking.

I recently watched a movie called Perfect Days. It’s about a man in Japan who cleans public toilets for a living.

That might not sound like the foundation for an enjoyable life, but this man finds pleasure in the simplest things. He listens to old cassette tapes. He eats at familiar places. He enjoys his lunch breaks and takes photographs of the sunlight coming through the trees.

He isn’t waiting for some grand event to make his life worthwhile.

That movie stayed with me.

It made me wonder how many things I walk past every day without really seeing them.

And tonight, thinking about my buddy heading to the gym at midnight, I started wondering about something else.

How many different ways are there to live an ordinary life?

We’re all walking around in our own little worlds. We have our routines, our habits, and our ideas about what a normal day should look like.

After enough years, those ideas become so familiar that we stop questioning them.

It’s like wearing blinders. We see the path directly in front of us, but we forget there might be other paths.

I’m not suggesting we all need to start going to the gym at midnight. I might never do that.

But I would like to reach a point where I don’t automatically dismiss the idea of enjoying a Tuesday evening simply because Wednesday is a workday.

I would like to stop deciding that Sunday is finished hours before it actually ends.

And I suspect there are other people who have figured out ways of enjoying ordinary life that have never even occurred to me.

That’s something I want to explore more here on Your Years Ahead.

Not another collection of rules about how we’re supposed to live. I’d rather discover how other ordinary people actually live, what they enjoy, and what makes their days worthwhile.

Maybe seeing life through someone else’s eyes will help us notice something we’ve been missing in our own.

I don’t expect one realization to undo a habit I’ve carried for decades.

But tonight, I keep coming back to one thought.

I have to work tomorrow. That doesn’t mean I have to give it tonight, too.