Saturday Mornings Are Worse Than Tuesdays
It is ten to nine on a Saturday and I am still at the kitchen table. The second coffee went cold at my elbow about twenty minutes ago. I have been sitting here since a bit after seven, which is nearly two hours, and I could not tell you what happened in them. On a Tuesday, the same table, the same coffee, forty minutes, I would have read something, written something down, and left the flat feeling roughly assembled.
The weekday morning has a wall at the end of it
At nine on a Tuesday I start work, and everything before nine is shaped by that. The hour is bounded, so it is dense. I know I get one coffee and about half an hour of sitting, and the knowledge does something useful to how I spend it. Saturday has no wall. The hour can be three hours, so it becomes three hours, and the same amount of actual living gets spread across them until it is thin enough to see through.
This is the opposite of what I expected when I started paying attention. The assumption baked into most writing about unhurried mornings is that more time produces a better morning. My experience is a clean inversion of that. The best mornings I have are the ones with a hard edge at the end, and the worst are the ones that could go on indefinitely and therefore do.
What spread and thin looks like in practice
The second coffee is the first symptom, and it is almost always a stalling device rather than a want. I make it because the first one ending would mean the sitting is over, and I am not ready for the sitting to be over, so I extend it with something I do not particularly need.
Then there is re-reading. I will get through a page of a book, notice I have absorbed nothing, go back, and do it again, three times, which is not reading, it is sitting near a book. And around half past nine, reliably, I open the laptop to look at one specific thing, and the one specific thing turns into forty minutes of work I was not going to do on a Saturday. The unstructured morning does not stay unstructured. It gets colonised by whatever has the most gravity, and on a weekend that is usually work.
The fake appointment experiment
My first fix was to build an artificial wall. I put something in the calendar at ten every Saturday, a phone call, an errand, a made up deadline for a piece of writing. It worked twice. By the third weekend I had stopped believing my own appointment, because I knew who had set it and I knew that person would forgive me. A self imposed deadline seems to have a shelf life of about two weeks in my hands, after which it is decoration.
What I take from that: the wall has to come from outside me, or it is not a wall, it is a note I wrote to myself.
What works instead is leaving
The Saturday that goes well is the one where I am out of the flat by half eight to buy bread. The bakery two streets over sells the loaf I want and stops having it by about ten, which is a wall I did not build and cannot argue with. Being outside also does its own work. The walk is twelve minutes each way, the light on that street in the morning is worth the trip on its own, and by the time I am back at the table the morning has a shape: there was a before and an after, rather than one continuous smear.
I have also found that the coffee I drink after coming back is better than the coffee I drink instead of going. Same beans. It is not the coffee.
There is a smaller version for the mornings when I genuinely do not want to go anywhere, which is opening the door onto the landing and sweeping the two steps outside the flat. It takes four minutes and it has very little to do with the steps, which are not dirty. It seems to count as leaving in whatever way my head requires, which suggests the useful part is crossing the threshold rather than the bread.
Sunday is a third thing entirely
Sunday morning has a wall too, but at the wrong end and made of the wrong material. Monday is pressing on it. The hour is not spread and thin, it is compressed and slightly anxious, and my attention keeps sliding forward to the week rather than sideways into the room. Saturday’s problem is that nothing is coming. Sunday’s problem is that something is. I have not solved either, though I have noticed that on Sunday the thing that helps is doing a small piece of Monday’s work early, deliberately, so that the anticipation has somewhere to land.
Why I defend the boring weekday version
If I had to keep one, I would keep Tuesday. This surprises me every time I say it, because the weekday morning is the constrained one, the one with a job attached to the end of it, and the whole genre I am writing in tends to treat the constraint as the enemy. In my kitchen the constraint is the feature. Forty minutes with a wall at the end reliably beats three hours without one, and I have run that comparison most weekends for two years now. I would like to be the person for whom an open Saturday is a gift. Mostly I am the person who lets it evaporate and then feels obscurely bad at ten to nine.
