Is Today Tuesday?
Why is it most of my life I have conceded to the fact that Mondays are the most difficult day of the week? Does it have to be that way? I and many others, have just settled in to the notion that Mondays just plain suck. It all may have started back in grade school. Skateboarding on the weekends, jumping our bikes, building forts, and scraping our knees only for it to come to an abrupt halt and find yourself in a chair, listening to your teacher with coffee breath, teaching long division. As I got older, maybe the haze and hangover met me sluggishly on a Monday morning as I sat in a cubicle, under fluorescent lighting, choking down a burnt cup of coffee from the break room. Now the phase of life I find myself in, is running full steam with my wife and 3 children who leave me exhausted come Monday making it difficult to kick the tires and light the fires to “perform” at work.
One Sunday morning my family made a trip down to San Diego to meet up with some old friends at a campsite to surf, bbq, and let the kids run around before heading back home and prep for the week ahead. The surf that day was waist to shoulder high, with a light wind out of the south providing for some playful Summer fun. No one really around, just me and a buddy catching up and finding a couple waves in between the laughs. An hour or so in to the session 500 yards down the beach I see what looked like an older gentleman slowly paddling our direction. His paddles were smooth, not hurried, strong and graceful. He caught a couple waves and you could tell he was in a world all to himself.
In between sets we eventually found ourselves sitting right next to one another in the lineup. He looked over at me and we struck up a conversation.
“Getting some fun ones?” I said.
“You betcha”, he said with a very as a matter of fact tone.
“How long you been out”, I asked.
“Oh I don’t know, say maybe 3, 4 hours”, he replied.
Wow! I thought. This ol’ codger had to be pushing 70 years old and he’d been out for how long? Naturally I began to lean in.
“Oh yeah, I started about a mile up the beach caught some waves down this way, and now I’ll probably catch some waves back up before dark. Little swell comin in the next few days….gotta get to Baja before they do”.
“You’re headed down to Mexico tonight”, I asked.
“Oh yeah. We’re gonna go as soon as I get back”, he said with a subtle grin from underneath his beard.
“Who’s we”, I asked inquisitively.
“My wife and I. We’ve been driving down from Mendocino in our bus. Went through helluva rainstorm right when we left. Didn’t think the ‘ol bucket of bolts would make it. But, she did. Smooth sailin ever since.
I watched him as he began to relive his trip, filling me in on some of the adventures they’ve had along the way.
“How long have you been in San Diego”, I asked.
A seemingly simple question. I watched as he slowly sat up on his board and look up in to the sky searching for the answer to my question. I could see him thinking and mumbling some numbers under his breath, reaching for the answer. Then he looked at me and said,
“Is today Tuesday?”
I chuckled and said, “Close. It’s Sunday”.
He smiled, “Right. Sunday. Then we’ve been here about 3 days. Surfs been pretty good the whole time”.
And right then a set swung his way, he flipped the single fin, two strokes and trimmed a waist high left back in to the world from which I took him. I watched in amazement as he slowly made his way back up the coast until he ultimately disappeared into the coastal haze.
“He had no idea what day of the week it was”, I thought to myself. A concept so foreign to me. As I thought more and more about it I began to become more and more envious. He was in the ultimate flow state. He was like Michael Jordan, in the 4th quarter, with the championship game on the line. Locked in. No distractions. The master conductor making art surrounded by his orchestra. Only this one took the shape of a white haired, thick bearded, 70 year old man who was on a salty adventure of life. No distractions. Artfully in tune with what was important and things like, “days of the week” were merely in a category of, “things that don’t necessarily matter”.
Is this a real way we can be in the world? Many may read this and laugh at such whimsical loftiness. But, I’m not so sure. I bet the 5 days on, 2 days off doesn’t have to come with such an abrupt inertia. If a 70 year old man from Mendocino can surf for 4 hours before heading to Mexico with his wife, in a bus, then I’ll bet a 40 year old man can find a weekly, sustainable life rhythm and cadence.
