I have always thought it interesting how different days of the week possess a distinct “feel,” a personality of sorts. I suppose this feeling attributed to a specific day of the week is entirely a social construct dependent upon how that day is, or was, predominately spent in the social construction zone of your self-construction.

Many moons ago, each day was most likely just a period of light between the darkness comprised of a fairly short “To Do” list of finding food and not becoming food. Two things to do each and every day. Well…three things…need to make new humans to replace the ones that failed at task two. Turns out humans are pretty good at making new humans and quickly outpaced the sabretooth tigers nefarious plans for our populations demise. So it goes.

Once those three tasks were checked off you were free to spend the rest of the day doing as you please: crafting (sharpening sticks and stones), fashion design (tiger print…never wear polar bear after Labor Day), Netflix (cloud and star gazing…more tigers). Ah…the good ol’ days.

“The Social Construction of Days and the Self” sounds like a snoozer of a title you might see on the cover of a book lingering forlorn and forgotten at the bottom of the bargain bin at a used bookstore. Used books that never got used. Don’t blame it on the book, it’s the author that put the words in it that failed to compel readers to read it.

The singer/songwriter John Prine was quite adept at putting compelling words to our daily tasks of living, “You say you drive around the town till you just get bored, and then you change your mind, for something else to do, and your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you.”

“Your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you.” Sometimes we think we know what we need or want, our mind contrives all sorts of reasons for this and for that, and our heart goes along for the ride…for a while. It goes along quietly at the beginning, but gradually grows more insistent about the direction it would really like to go. An insistence, like that book at the bottom of the bargain bin, we can choose to ignore.

Don’t blame the heart, it’s the owner of the vessel that continues in an uncompelling direction. Sometimes willfully and knowingly and sometimes begrudgingly…without choice. Choice. As Viktor Frankl once said, “Everything can be taken from us but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In our heart, in theory, we most likely know this, in our mind, and possibly in reality, we may not currently have an option for another route so we keep “driving around the town” despite the boredom our heart is experiencing. Maybe someday? Someday when…

To lean on the lyrics of Mr. Prine one more time, sometimes “Saturday made Sunday feel like it would never come” and other times it “felt just like Sunday on Saturday afternoon.”

What do the days of your week feel like?