Sunday gives me a particular space that the other days refuse to provide. It has done ever since my final year of university, those tangled days of ambitious excitement and furious motion. Some Sundays were quiet enough for me to witness the world like Janus, looking forwards and backwards at once.
Decades later, I still sit with the week that passed and the week that is coming. I used to do this because I believed in the Protestant work ethic version of planning, the one built on intensity, efficiency, and the fantasy that effort alone could hold a life together. That belief carried me from Hull to warmer climes. It built the stability I now enjoy. It also taught me the cost of brute capacity, the way it stretches and frays. Since Covid my systems have evolved into something else entirely.
These days the purpose of my systems is gentler and more honest. Planning is no longer about squeezing productivity from every corner of my calendar. It is about creating a rhythm I can actually live inside, and read inside. I still use apps like TickTick to track every professional demand, and most tasks still land ahead of time, but the structures themselves have been pruned down to what truly matters. They work because they allow me to breathe intellectually rather than grind improbably.
Life eventually tests every structure you build. Deaths, divorces, illness, exhaustion. When the ground drops away beneath you, you don’t rise to your best self; you fall to the level of your habits. The point of a system is simply to keep you moving in some workable direction.
The part of my week that has been suffocated for too long is my reading and writing. The two things that nourish me most have often been pushed to the final edges of my week, crowded out by every sensible obligation. Perhaps I’ve feared that giving them space would unravel my work, weaken my teaching, or make me look unfocused. The truth is simpler. Reading and writing make me a better teacher, and a better human being. Those who can, do.
I intend to return to an old habit next week: model reading in class. Yes, it is a little performative. But such a performance impacts everyone. The room settles, the mind sharpens, and I receive the very thing I keep pretending I don’t have time for. I’m curious to see how this feels over the next few weeks.
Sunday matters because without it the weeks dissolve into each other. The long slide of adult life can fall into a corporate blur. Sunday gives shape to a finite week. And in the end we are all food for worms. If we don’t make space to notice our own lives, no culture will notice them for us.
