The Man Who Tried to Outrun a Monday

There was a man — a perfectly reasonable man, with a perfectly reasonable job, a perfectly reasonable flat, and no unusual sorrows — who, every Sunday from approximately seven in the evening, was seized by a low, formless dread of the coming Monday. This had been going on for eleven years. He had done nothing to deserve it. Monday had done nothing, in particular, to deserve it either. Monday was, in most respects, a Tuesday with a slight image problem.

He had tried many things. He had tried, one September, going to the gym at seven on Sunday evenings on the theory that a body full of endorphins could not, physically, dread anything. He came home from the gym at half past eight, showered, ate, sat down, and was gently ambushed by the dread at five past nine.

He had tried, another year, planning something nice for Monday morning — a favourite coffee, a walk through a particular street with cherry trees on it, a small treat placed carefully on the desk in advance. He arrived on Monday morning, drank the favourite coffee, walked past the cherry trees, and found the small treat on his desk waiting for him. He was, briefly, delighted. He was, twenty minutes later, back to normal levels of Monday.

He had tried elaborate Sunday-night wind-down routines. He had tried, one memorable January, moving his entire workweek so that his Monday was on a Wednesday. He got to Wednesday. Wednesday, sensing an opportunity, became the new Monday.

One Sunday evening, at about a quarter to eight, he sat down on his sofa and, instead of doing any of these things, he asked the dread, out loud, 'What are you actually afraid of?' He felt slightly foolish. The dread, however, seemed to have been waiting a long time to be asked. It answered, in the kind of small voice these things use when finally given a chair, 'That I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing with my life, and every Monday morning I have to pretend I am, for another week, and I am tired of pretending.'

The man sat with this for a while. He had, he realised, been treating the dread as a problem to be solved. It was not a problem. It was a message. It was, in fact, quite a specific message, and it had been trying to deliver itself for eleven years, and every strategy he had tried had been, essentially, a way to sign for the parcel without opening it.

He did not, that night, quit his job. Nobody should quit their job at eight in the evening on a Sunday on the strength of a single revelation. But he did, on Monday afternoon, take an actual lunch break, which he had not done for four years. He did, on Wednesday, phone a friend who had once left a similar job to do something braver and ask her how it had gone. He did, that Saturday, take an old notebook down from a shelf and write, at the top of a fresh page, the words: 'What am I actually for?'

It is a very good question. He is still, three years later, working out the answer. His Sunday-night dread is not, he wants to be clear, entirely gone. It comes, sometimes, when things get busy. But it is quieter now, because he has been listening to it. It knows it has been heard. It does not need to shout as much when you are, at last, taking notes.

The lesson, if you would like one to take into your own Sunday evening, is this. The uncomfortable feeling you have been trying to outrun is not, usually, chasing you to hurt you. It is chasing you to hand you a note. Stop running for a minute. Take the note. You do not have to act on it that night. You do not have to burn your life down. You only have to open it, read it, and thank the messenger, who has been running behind you for a long time and would very much, at last, like to sit down.