How Do You Break Up The Ferocious Five-Day Monotony?
I was so moved by this article that described how recently, Elmo went online to ask how billions in the world were doing. Hundreds of millions viewed this question and over 18,000 replied. Here is one highlighted response:
“Every morning, I cannot wait to go back to sleep. Every Monday, I cannot wait for Friday to come. Every single day and every single week for life.”
It got me thinking, how do I break out of this normal “rinse and repeat” process? Like many, I have developed some tried and true strategies to shake up my normal work week and life in general.
These still winter days of February have brought more startingly warm weather periods to Iowa. Temperatures this week are getting up to 50 F. I have started thinking of possible day trips to take. This has been an adventure for the past several years — to visit numerous unique, alluring, and quaint places far and near. So over the past decade or so, I have ventured to hundreds of wonderful destinations with my wife, family members, friends, or just myself. This breaks up the monotony of a typical work week and also helps me to revisit the unlimited vastness and richness of the world of worlds out there.
Writing and reading on amazing online platforms like this one makes my days and weeks extra interesting. It helps me to expand my horizons and consider insights and viewpoints from other perspectives. Such activity exposes me to countless new worlds. One of my key activities is managing my Quora space Onion Scales which is dedicated to discovering unconsidered and unexplored subject matter.
Over the years, I have been able to expand my world to make more room for the other. This must be a key element in anyone’s attempt to break the monotony. Giving of one’s deeper self through charity and service expands one’s heart and spirit to the life of the greater universe and the Divine’s infinitely miraculous workings at the heart of things. Through one of my secret callings of service, I have actually been able to offer a helping hand to those in very dark places mentally or spiritually and even helped to save lives. May we all find ourselves so blessed to be able to find ourselves being able to make such immeasurable impacts on others and the greater world.
Like everyone, I also have amateur hobbies or pastimes that keep me busy. A lifelong pianist, I occasionally make it down to my native home and serenade my wife and parents with melodies on a century-old piano that has been in my family for generations. I seriously need to expand my musical life, so one of my goals is to buy a violin. Then, I will gradually learn to play myself or perhaps take lessons.
There are many other such pastimes, hobbies, and endeavors I engage myself in to keep myself busy and make life more interesting at its seams. I love reading, writing, hiking, spending time with my wife, family, and friends, and getting absorbed in new dramas, documentaries, or films on streaming services. Like others, I am awed and humbled more by the vast majority of things beyond my personal pastime and endeavor list that I will never do. This includes things I do not really ever desire to do like go skydiving, hunt wild boars, or ride livestock in rodeos. Realizing the vast majority of things beyond my domain reminds me more of the unlimited vastness, richness, and complexity of things.
Unlike others, my age, my wife and I do not have children for whom we could share our love and care while also investing wholly in their world. While we are not able to experience what it is like to help our own offspring reach new leaps and bounds or help them become their own persons, a life of just the two of us does open other doors like being just two and still savoring other life riches like times with family, friends, and one another. Each life is a unique array of opportunities, experiences, and riches to be savored.
So these are a few ways I break up that Monday through Friday rigamarole. Such a cycle can be its own form of ferocious, for sure. But so can other contrary patterns. Is the rinse-and-repeat life cycle more or less desirable than a lifestyle of constant unnecessary drama or a pattern of throwing aside order and calm for some ever-elusive next big thing?
There is this alluring middle ground of breaking up the monotony and venturing down untrodden paths of exciting hobbies, wondrous connections, and charity and service to the larger world. We each can live a deeper life of impenetrable richness and wonder. How are you doing this? How are you breaking up the rinse-and-repeat cycle just a bit?
