SUNDAY

 

One’s own life feels less precious; one can contemplate being no longer present with tranquillity. You might head off to a café in a bit, maybe take a book or your journal, eat scrambled eggs with spinach; it could be nice to take a walk in the park later and see how the ducks are doing. The point wasn’t to be joyless it was to make sure that time was free for other things. For a very long time, especially in the western world, the idea of Sunday was bound up with religion. A crucial part of the pleasure of Sunday morning is our awareness that it’s a distinct, unusual time. Normally you check your phone while brushing your teeth, rapidly scanning the messages that have come in overnight, mentally racing to keep track of all the things you’ll have to be on top of for the day, as you struggle quickly into your work clothes. Some may be scarcely known at all: the unexplored areas of potential in which one could (given the opportunity) grow vegetables, learn Italian, dance the rumba or perhaps fall in love with the villas of Le Corbusier. It mustn’t be squandered. One was supposed to go to Church. Sunday is a name for the time in which we can explore ourselves and discover, or rediscover, parts of ourselves that we haven’t properly come to know as yet. Such collective rules have largely disappeared. It’s quieter than usual outside; the background sound of traffic is muted. But the underlying need remains: the time needs to be protected. If certain people could encounter us at this point, they might be amazed at our transformation and at our newfound generosity and empathy. You’re briefly liberated from the pressure of watching the clock, you don’t need to keep up. They are the distant provinces of who one really is of which news has rarely if at all, come to the main centers of habitation. At such moments, the world reveals itself as quite different: a place of suffering and misguided effort, full of people striving to be heard and lashing out against others, but also a place of tenderness and longing, beauty and touching vulnerability. You can dawdle in the bathroom. One might decide not to take a break from digital life, not read a newspaper, not to fill the day with routine administrative tasks. Other parts are almost neglected and exist in an undeveloped state. But we should make the most of them when they arise and harvest their insights for the time when we require them most. No one will be expecting anything from you until tomorrow morning. The secular pleasure of Sunday morning isn’t simply one of relaxation and freedom; it’s also linked to a feeling (which might not always be very explicit) that one has the opportunity to reengage with the wider horizons of one’s life.6226061602_7ceddf1036_z The hope is that we can for a while turn away from current affairs, towards the elevated, the silent, and the eternal. There’s not much you actually have to do today. We shouldn’t in any case aspire to make them permanent, because they don’t sit so well with the many important practical tasks we all need to attend to. But the needs that it addresses are actually entirely independent of that framework. 17280357409_2a2379c179_zYou could compare your personality to a country. 15125174889_094427d34e_zThe another side of the traditional Sabbath was a contrastive set of expectations around the things you positively engaged within this specially designated period of twenty-four hours – motivated by the thought that a day is long, but not infinite. The fitting response is universal sympathy and kindness. One’s interests are put aside and one may imaginatively fuse with transient or natural things: trees, the wind, a moth, clouds or waves breaking on the shore. This morning it doesn’t matter. To ensure a day of rest there were various prohibitions. From this point of view, status is nothing, possessions don’t matter, grievances lose their urgency. Many diverse regions make up who you are: the work self, the home self, the side of you that comes to the fore when you speak to your father or which you glimpse when you look at a photo of Norwegian fjords. It was the Christian adaptation of the Jewish Sabbath: a day taken to have been set aside by God. There’s a real danger of filling up the day with distractions. We’re reaching towards higher consciousness – though maybe not used to putting it in quite these terms. Normally, we’re immersed in practical, unintrospective, self-justifying outlooks that are the hallmarks of what we could call ‘lower’ consciousness. On Sunday Mornings

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On weekdays you’d be out of the house by now, but today you’re still in bed. Down the road, you hear a car door slam. You don’t necessarily visit them all equally. Ceremonies were evolved to turn people’s minds to questions that matter but that typically get marginalized: what am I doing with my life, how are my relationships going, what do I really value and why? The traditional idea of Sunday was framed in religious terms. Business would be closed; shops, theatres, and bars would be shut; the train timetable would be curtailed. Out of the window, the bands of clouds are drifting very, very slowly. You’ve got time to notice how the light is filtering through a gap in the curtains. It might rain this afternoon. The genius of the traditional religious concept of Sunday was to combine a set of restrictions with a positive agenda for the day. There’s the jacket you bought in Edinburgh, you haven’t worn that for a while. Attention to them has been edged out in the most understandable ways by the demands of work and the expectations of others. In fact, the demands of life mean we normally tend to concentrate on just a few zones. States of higher consciousness are, of course, desperately short-lived.