Every Monday Morning Is A Training Ground

You Can Always Choose To Be Alive

So far, my Monday morning has looked like this:

• 6 am: woke up early, super tired after a really bad night’s sleep
• 6.10–6.20 am: somehow managed to have an argument with my partner in the 10 minutes between getting up and leaving the house for work
• 6.30 am: accidentally bumped into another car while driving to work
• 7–9 am: instead of seizing the day, scrolled through social media for 2 hours like a zombie
• 9 am: stopped feeling sorry for myself and starting writing this article

Yeah, I know, Monday mornings are hard. That it can feel as if the whole world is working against you, silently mocking your fall from grace — outwardly marking your ugly and awkward transition from gloriously-care-free-weekend to soul-destroying-working-week. On reflection, this one wasn’t even that bad. It just had a distinct Monday morning feeling to it. Okay, here we go again.

So 6–9am didn’t exactly go as I wanted. I’ll never get those 3 hours back. Fine. But what happened at 9am? What changed? What stopped that pervasive Monday morning feeling in its tracks?

What changed is that I remembered: Monday mornings are actually where it’s at. Monday mornings are when we’re alive. They’re a training ground for the rest of life. In fact, so is every other morning, and every single evening and afternoon. Waiting for Monday mornings to be over is like lying dead, patiently waiting to be born again. But you can be alive right now if you wanted to. Which, after 3 hours of procrastination, is what I finally chose to do.

And that’s the thing: No matter what’s just happened, you can still choose to be alive.

Life is a Training Ground

Look, no one said life would be easy. You’ve got to work hard. Get your heart broken at some point. See your loved ones get sick or hurt. Naturally, we try and protect ourselves from all these things. That’s why we look for jobs that make us financially secure, enter into long-term relationships that give us a sense of stability and intimacy, try to do as much exercise as we can and eat plenty of vegetables — all that stuff. That’s one way of dealing with the uncertainties and challenges of life. Create a Plan. Achieve Your Goals. Find Security. Armor Yourself Up. Bounce Back.

But there is another way of dealing with life’s difficulties. In the face of difficult feelings, you can neither try to get rid of them nor ignore them. Instead, you can be curious about how you feel and treat your difficult feelings as an opportunity to understand yourself and the world more deeply. Right there and then, in the presence of uncomfortable emotions, you can ask yourself:

• How am I trying to avoid this pain? What habitual and unconscious distractions am I reaching for? How can I respond differently?
• How am I reacting to this tragedy? How am I desperately trying to re-invent myself amongst the chaos? How can I let myself just be who I am?
• What story am I telling myself about this strong emotion? How am I using this emotion to feel more certain and secure? How can I be more open to what I don’t know?
• How am I trying to feel as if I’m a good person, to find perfection and security? How am I trying to stay in control of my life? How can I be alive to what life is like right now?

This is how life is a training ground. Instead of constantly trying to protect ourselves from life, we can acknowledge that life is full of problems, which, no matter how successful we are, we’ll never fully overcome. As Pema Chodron says in her classic text, When Things Fall Apart:

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy… Trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience… Rather than trying to get rid of something, we take the opportunity to see how we close down when we’re squeezed. This is how we open our hearts.”

Now, it’s easy to read a nice passage like that and nod along to the general sentiment — “Yeah, cool, accept the good and the bad, the rough and the smooth.” Anyone who’s done meditation or mindfulness would probably endorse the value of curiosity and openness. But putting these ideas into practice — in the sticky, messy confusion of everyday life — is another thing altogether.

It took me 3 hours this morning to realise I was definitely not treating my Monday morning as an opportunity to see how I close down when I’m squeezed. Instead, I mostly felt sorry for myself for being squeezed. I reached for my phone, got angry, annoyed, and who knows what else. I didn’t just lose those 3 hours in a productivity sense — that I could’ve got more stuff done. I also lost them in a spiritual sense. I wasn’t fully alive to my life, everything that was happening to me right there and then. It took me 3 hours to eventually choose to be alive. And this is the result.

I’m curious: Next Monday morning, will you choose to be alive? How about tomorrow morning? Or how about now?