Dear Journal: A Year of Sundays

Dear Journal,

I love Sundays. There’s just something about Sunday that is freeing, at least when I don’t work. Maybe it’s because Saturdays when I was young were always tied up with religion, not being able to do things, so Sunday was wide open, a spot of brilliant sunshine after the rain. And Sundays were always lazy, like an exhale. It was so exciting to have a whole day dedicated to nothing but the things that were interesting to me.

In fact, most of my writing back then happened on Sunday. I would get up early and get out my notebook, or my journal, or both, and my #3 pencil, and I would just start with no particular literary destination in mind. There was no coffee to sharpen my mind because my mind was as sharp as that pencil back then. That’s not to say my writing was sharp and uncluttered, because it wasn’t. It was emergent, as was I.

Sundays began to take on a different hue as I got older, though. More of those “Monday” trappings began to attach themselves to me early, gearing up for school, ironing clothes, various responsibilities that begin by creeping in and end up taking over. Parties, and games, and day trips, and those responsibilities started ruling Sundays, and my writing disappeared. For a year of Sundays it languished in the prison of cacophony, penned in like chickens in a coop, and I missed it like a phantom limb.

But slowly it came back to me, the Sunday that I used to know, only in bits and pieces. I learned how to make use of moments in my Sundays, moments to sit and write before moving on to the next project. It was a shift, a maturation of thought that helped me coordinate those precise moments to my best advantage. I learned that I don’t need to deny myself Sundays, that I can fit a year of Sundays into moments of Sundays parsed out over a larger span of time. And it has made all the difference.

Now it’s laundry time.

Sam