An Unexpected Source of Inspiration From A Sunday Distraction.
Sometimes, all we need to do is to break an established behavioral pattern.

I do not enjoy taking a break from my work. I do take short breaks to recharge and get going. However, it is another thing when we go away for days, and we lose our momentum.
From that perspective, weekdays and weekends are the same to me. I love to work because I work for myself and not someone else. That is true for 80% of the work that I do for the past couple of years.
Therefore, I have optimized my habits and time for productivity. I derive satisfaction from getting things done daily. Distractions hardly bother me, much to the dismay of my family members.
My family operates on the work-life balance paradigm. That means the culture of that pervasive 9 am — 6 pm mentality runs deep in a family where a majority goes through the same system. The differences between weekends and weekdays are stark.
Weekends are precious, for a break, for socializing, for binge-watching Netflix and Free-To-Air television, for drooling over ridiculously handsome Korean actors over the screen.
Two different worlds. Two different ways of living.
I woke up this pretty late morning as I had to repay the sleep debt accrued over the week. Multiple projects were due on the same week, and that led to consecutive late-nights. Better workload planning has to be in place.
As consciousness came to me gradually, I woke up to a dull-looking spouse beside me. She was catching up with global news and sighing every 5 minutes. It was Sunday Blues in full effect.
Knowing that her mind was on the deadlines for next week, I did not ask why she behaved the way she did. I would, in my usual self, share that comfortable silence in the bed.
I grabbed my phone and started reading news from the Bloomberg application.
It did not take long before she asked if we could go out for lunch. I do not enjoy eating out on a Sunday because of the crowds. It is hard to get a seat, and it is inevitable to share tables.
Looking at her face, I thought I should give her a break from my usual no-responses.
So, we washed the clothes, hanged them, get bathed, and headed out. We wanted to patronize that restaurant at the end of the street, 10-minute away by foot. We had been there multiple times, and we loved the authentic Thai food.
I was praying hard that it would be empty on a Sunday.
We began our journey.
We did not converse much. My spouse was in the Sunday Blues bubble while I stared into space. A big part of me wanted to get back to work. I did not know why I agreed to spend more time away from it.
And then I started to observe the skies. It is a beautiful afternoon. The skies were blue, and there were puffy white clouds. A gentle breeze followed us throughout, so we did not sweat buckets before we arrived at the lunch destination.
We walked past more traffic lights than I thought there were, and as luck would have it, the green man greeted us every time we approached the road junctions. It made me realized that traffic lights do not add to traveling time. The red man does.
Okay, I learned something new even though it was trivial.
To our surprise, the restaurant was empty when we got to our tables. I looked at the clock on my phone as my spouse went through the menu. It was 215 pm, and I figured that was the reason for the peaceful environment.
We arrived after lunchtime.
Once again, I learned that lunching out on a Sunday does not mean wasting time. Lunching out during lunchtime does. I looked at my spouse struggling with the food order and thought that we should get out more often on Sundays.
Okay, I felt that way for a brief moment.
And it made me wonder.
We create habits and optimize our daily life experiences based on what we want to do. We also have pre-conceived notions dictating why we should not do others.
However, there are many faces of reality. What we experienced previously could be one aspect of it and not it.
Lunching out on a Sunday is an example.
When we allow ourselves to break those habits we have perfected over the years for random distractions to take over, good things may happen.
A new perspective and a new mode of thinking may hit us.
And that might be an unexpected source of inspiration derived from a Sunday distraction.
Inspiration Can Come From Distraction.
Aldric
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