It Worked

Wednesdays have been the longest day of my week for a while. Wednesday starts like every day with walking the dog around 6:30A. From there Wednesday rolls into church, which then rolls into my workday, which then ends up at yoga, which ends around 8:30P, which means I’m home around 9P. I’ve been struggling for a while with how to break up the day, while still finding a way to get to church one morning during the week and yoga once a week.

The only option I have for the yoga class with the instructor whose teaching style I like a lot is on Wednesday evenings. There are a couple of Saturday classes in the morning, however they conflict with my cycling training program, which calls for long rides on Saturdays and Sundays. Church is every weekday morning at the same time.

Writing about this now makes it more obvious to me that the best option to shorten my Wednesday is to change the day I go to church in the morning. My tendency was to always push it later in the week, i.e. Thursday or Friday. Thursdays are pretty packed too, so that didn’t work real well. If I pushed church from Wednesday to Thursday, I usually found myself skipping it on Thursday and maybe getting there Friday as a result.

I was hung up on thinking that I had to go to church in the second half of the week, since that would balance best with going on Sundays. Wednesday was the middle of the week and would be the perfect day, at least that’s what I told myself.

Last week, rather than continue to wish yoga was on Tuesday evening, I made the decision to go to church on Tuesday morning. I moved it in my calendar last week, so that I remembered the choice I had made as this week got started.

It worked.

Not only do I now feel like Wednesdays aren’t such a long push, I also don’t look at Mondays and Tuesdays as I had in weeks past. Mondays and Tuesdays always seemed like these two big, grey stone monoliths, that I had to climb each week, before seeing some light on the other side to the middle and end of the week. I’m not sure why this is how I looked at Mondays and Tuesdays, only that I did look at them this way. I think part of it may have been feeling the need to get revved up to get the week started again, after taking a pause over the weekend. I’m still figuring this part out and may experience some additional clarity related to it over time.

I do know that getting out on Tuesday morning felt great and look forward to doing it again next week. It helps to not feel holed-up at home, trying to conquer Monday and Tuesday, before I can allow myself to look at the rest of the week in a different way. Just the simple change of changing the routine helped me break through that feeling. A few simple exchanges in the morning with people I wouldn’t have otherwise come into contact with also helped break the feeling of isolation that can sometimes surround me when I put my head down to conquer Monday and Tuesday from my home office. It felt nice to feel connected into the community earlier in the week than I usually do.

What really surprises me, looking back, is how tied up I was by trying to impose what I thought was the right Sunday and Wednesday balance in my schedule for church. This rigidity I has established in the schedule, that I clung to pretty strongly, was in fact holding me back from making the change that would be most helpful for me. I’m going to keep that in mind as I experience similar constraints I impose on myself, to see if that may help me break through them and enjoy some unexpected benefits along the way.