In praise of Monday: Notes on making each day count

It was a beautiful Monday morning in Montevideo today — a bright, blue-sky kind of morning with only a few cottonball clouds on the horizon — and I decided to spend a bit of time journaling first, instead of getting to work straightaway.

I ended up finishing the mammoth art journal I’d been keeping throughout 2017, and then I began looking back through the journal I kept in 2016 — which covers the time I lived in San Francisco for several months, all the way to my move to Uruguay at the end of that year. And it was then that I stumbled across an entry I’d written two years ago, on a quiet evening in San Francisco, titled “In praise of Monday.” I was still freelancing during my time there, which wasn’t exactly the best move for my bank account, but — as the entry reminded me today — it kept my schedule open to wonderful moments of connection with the community I’d found in the city.

The entry also reminded me why I love keeping an art journal in the first place — it’s a way of capturing little slices of life from our extraordinary, ordinary days, and whenever we read them in the future, it’s as though we’re returned right to that very moment and place in time. I felt inspired to share this particular slice of life with you here today, taken directly from my beloved art journal:

11 January 2016 — Rinse Laundromat.

Mondays are for waking up on a dear friend’s cloud of a couch, ensconced in a warm duvet, with a fresh cup of coffee and the Sausalito harbor stretching out beyond her window, after an evening of tortilla soup and sparkling rosé and lovely conversation.

Mondays are for sprinting downhill, because today, your commute requires catching the 8:20am ferry back into San Francisco, and sprinting again when you get to the ferry terminal, because the narrow strip of horizon not covered by clouds is still ruby red with the remnants of dawn, and there are clouds shaped like waves over the city and seagulls in the sky and something darting just below the surface of the water in pursuit of a fish.

The fish jumping from the water is what directs your attention to this activity. Then there’s a shadow with a distinctive fin — a dolphin! your mind says. And then the seal breaks the surface, exposing its slick brown body, and your mind corrects itself.

Mondays are for standing outside on the bow of the ferry as it makes its way across the bay, letting the wind sting your eyes, tangle your hair, and push you onward to the Embarcadero BART station. Mondays are for fighting against the current, for not being one of the many people emptying out into the Financial District at 9am.

Mondays are for picking up a borrowed car and driving to the Cliff House, to meet yet another set of dear friends for brunch, and when you arrive, the sight of the ocean will take your breath away, for the way the waves are breaking long and wide on the shore, for the misty hills in the distance, for the soft golden light you’ve come to love so much in this city.

Mondays are for Eggs Benedict and Bloody Mary’s. Mondays are for taking the long way home through Golden Gate Park, just so you can smell the eucalyptus trees.

Mondays are for knowing you can smell eucalyptus in Golden Gate Park.

Mondays are for sitting in a laundromat at 9pm, perfectly happy, perfectly content, sipping a 16 oz. can of Crispin hard cider you bought from the market across the street because the quarter machine isn’t working and you needed change.

So, no, my new friend Pablo, whom I met in the elevator of a coworking space at the end of today, and who looked at me and said, “Hey, we survived Monday,” no — I believe Mondays are about so much more than surviving.

Thank you, God, that every day of this life is an exquisite gift.