Sunday Evening Blues

One thing that seems eternal is the mild depression one gets on Sunday evening. For as long as I can remember, I have always felt a quiet (or not-so-quiet) sense of foreboding, anxiety, frustration, or simple blah-ness over the end of the weekend and the coming week. It is not merely dread of the resumption of the work-week (although that certainly plays into it) and not merely a mourning of the passing of another weekend (though that is probably more of it). After the kids are in bed, darkness has fallen, the TV is off, and my wife and I are puttering in our separate patterns . . . then it starts to loom. It's a moment that's just quiet enough for genuine reflection on one's whole life to move side-by-side with the actual work-a-day anxieties of living . . . which is kind of like mixing alcohol with sleeping pills.

I have a few rituals to overcome this mood. I find that it helps a whole lot if the I cleaned my office sometime on Sunday, before the mood hits full-on; removing all the noisy clutter of things done and left undone can provide a little bit of emotional stability. The mood can be averted entirely if you manage to engage yourself whole-heartedly in something that needed doing for a long time. It's a good time to start something, a better time to finish something, and a lousy time to continue doing something that feels like it will go on forever.