It descends quick, normally between the hours of 5 and 7.30pm, being especially felt when the weather is turning and the last of the daylight has burnished the sky a shade of crimson pink before plunging into a sea of concluding darkness.
Even since I was a child, I understood this feeling but could never articulate it. As an adult, not much has changed; Sunday evenings are still my least favorite time of the week.
Recently, I came across an essay which argued that "The Sunday evening feeling is ordinarily associated with work, and the idea of going back to an office after a pleasant break." Therefore, the uneasiness or weight we feel is our conscious telling us that "we are going back to the wrong sort of work" (via). But that didn't really resonate with me because I don't work in an office or job I hate. I love and believe in my job and will, consciously, stay in it for the rest of my life
So why do I still feel the weight of a typical Sunday evening?
Because life still isn't enough.
The article continues:
We normally manage to keep the insistent calls of the true working self at bay during the week. We are too busy and too driven by an immediate need for money. But it reliably comes to trouble us on Sunday evenings. Like a ghost suspended between two worlds, it has not been allowed to live or to die, and so bangs at the door of consciousness, requiring resolution. We are sad, or panicked, because a part of us recognises that time is running out and that we are not presently doing what we should with what remains of our lives. The anguish of Sunday evening is our conscience trying to stir us inarticulately into making more of ourselves.
I don't quite agree with everything said, but I do think there is something there. Like the idea of our consciousness banging on a door, reminding us that time is running out, and fast.
Suddenly, spending most of Saturday morning skimming Facebook updates seems like a waste of precious time and that hour at the mountain lake should have been all about teaching Eden how to skip a rock, not taking pictures of my kids searching for them. Instead of watching football, I should have played it, with my son, as the snow fell from trees.
What if that Sunday evening feeling is a little nudge, a jab even, reminding us that time is running out. That even if we live well into our 70's and 80's or well into our 90's, the end will come faster than we expect and when it does, it will be too late, there will be no more weekends to try again.
What will we have to show for it? What will we have made of ourselves? Of our families? Of the world around us?
I like the way the essay concludes:
We should not keep our Sunday evening feelings simply for Sunday evenings. We should place these feelings at the center of our lives and let them be the catalysts for a sustained exploration that continues throughout the week, over months and probably years, and that generates conversations with ourselves, with friends, mentors and with professionals. Something very serious is going on when sadness and anxiety descend for a few hours on Sunday evenings . . .
And we would be wise to consider it. Before it's too late.
For more on . . .
-N- Stuff : On Living : Resume VS Eulogy Virtues
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