It is the second weekend on my island. I started out two
weeks ago by opining that my stay here felt like a month (now perhaps longer)
of Sundays. Now as the second Sunday rolls along, I feel a little ache of
nostalgia.
In a life where you are always at home, what do weekends
mean?
The weekend is a relatively new construct, an outgrowth of
labor reform in the early part of the last century. Before that, every day was
a workday, except Sunday, mandated as a day of worship and rest (and as we’ve
seen of the prohibition of entertainment). In agrarian societies this type of
schedule makes sense. The cows don’t know that it is Saturday.
Even in my lifetime, there has been dispute about the
sanctity of the full weekend. While a surgical resident, my program started
having our main conferences on Saturday mornings. We would come to round, do
our floor work, report on our patients to the on-call residents and then file
into an auditorium to hear some giant in orthopaedics present timeless words of
wisdom. After that we would return to the floor for last minute work, the odd
case or two and then finally home by the midafternoon. When the wellspring of
revolt finally surfaced, the chairman of the program (who happened to be my
father) asked us, “Where is it written that Saturday is a day off?”
Now, with the strange exigencies of this pandemic, each day
is smudged together, working or no. When the scenery doesn’t change, it is hard
to note the subtlety of time.
The upside is that we are being more productive on Saturdays
and even Sundays. Zoom meeting on those days? Why not? When every day is a day
home with the kids, there is no need to preserve our traditional ones.
The downside is the loss of the ‘special’. One of the things
about those long-ago Saturdays is that the morning always had a more casual
feel than the normal work week. There was more leisure, more camaraderie. Many
of the days ended not with more work but with an impromptu touch football on
the central quad of the Massachusetts General Hospital, something that could
never occur when later we shoehorned the meetings into a weekday morning.
On whatever island you are, I urge you to protect the ‘special’. Find a way to make a Saturday or a Sunday different (or a Wednesday or a Monday, it doesn’t matter right now). Make it stand out to remind you that time is a mobile construct and that there is still room for joy in our lives.
[This Post was adapted from a essay originally published on Facebook the day listed above]
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