Brain Food #853: A poem called Monday, for the Sunday blues, on a Friday
The life that is
Thoughts of the day
Hello friends,
The end of the summer break is near for many, and has already arrived for some. It has also been a long break for Brain Food, perhaps longer than intended. But as the law of reversed effort suggests, it is important not to always swim against the current, and to allow oneself to float from time to time.
In such moments, the turning of pages, there is an incongruence in our perception of time as it becomes disjointed: we reminisce about the past, we worry about or try to plan or imagine the future, while all this takes place in the present, which inevitably, invariably, gets neglected.
Today’s poem is about easing back into it, about learning to be in the life that is. As David Foster Wallace wrote: “our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”
Monday
by Alex Dimitrov
I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it
regardless of the weather
or how close I am to love.
Doesn’t it bother you sometimes
what living is, what the day has turned into?
So many screens and meetings
and things to be late for.
Everyone truly deserves
a flute of champagne
for having made it this far!
Though it’s such a disaster
to drink on a Monday.
To imagine who you would be
if you hadn’t crossed the street
or married, if you hadn’t
agreed to the job or the money
or how time just keeps going—
whoever agreed to that
has clearly not seen
the beginning of summer
or been to a party
or let themselves float
in the middle of a book
where for however briefly
it’s possible to stay longer than
you should. Unfortunately
for me and you, we have
the rest of it to get to.
We must pretend
there’s a blue painting
at the end of this poem.
And every time we look at it
we forget about ourselves.
And every time it looks at us
it forgives us for pain.
A blue painting for the end of the poem.
