Monday Mindfulness Minute: Welp, back to Reality...

“That was an awesome trip! I can’t believe we rode 17 dolphins, drank 96 pina coladas, and saw a man blow up a condom to put on his head during a magic show.”

“Same, I just felt so alive and happy the whole time. I’m so glad we took time to get away.”

“Me too! But it's back to reality now (heavy, dramatic sigh).”

We have all been there. We experience an exciting “get away” where we seem to unplug from the world and find the peace, happiness, and contentment that somehow elude us day to day, and we dread returning to the grind of work that seems to be the exact opposite of what we want to do. On a smaller scale, this is something most of us experience every Monday morning as the number of "welp, it's back to reality" and "the weekend just wasn't long enough" pile up because of the internal monologue that convinces us we would be happy if we were doing something different somewhere else.

Our current reality has somehow morphed into a cycle of working 5 days of reality to get 2 days of "peace" and working 49 weeks a year to get 3 weeks of PTO. I'm not a math major, but that math doesn't add up. And I've lived this type of "life." Except for me, my reality was that I only enjoyed a few hours each week on Friday Night when I was in the sweet spot of being glad the weekend had arrived but was also far enough from it being over (which I immediately started fretting come Saturday morning - "Only a few more hours of freedom before it's back to the grind"). It's not a fun reality.

The reality is that the average person will experience (really dread) 4,004 Mondays in their lifetime. It's time for us to reclaim Monday as a day of celebration, where we return to reality and focus not on what the mind tells us should be different, but on learning to appreciate the joy of everything real in the here and now (yes, this even includes the less-than-ideal Mondays). As Neal Allen says in his book "Better Days Ahead,"

"Check yourself right now. Do you need anything? I mean right now, in your chair or on your bed as you read this sentence. Not in an hour, right now. I can promise you the answer is no, you don't need anything this second... Right this moment you are protected from the weather, you aren't starving, and you aren't being mugged at gunpoint. Your needs are being met. For everybody in civilized society, this fact of not needing anything is true for about 99.9% of the conscious moments of our lives. And yet instead of recognizing that we're 99.9% satisfied, we complain that life is constantly letting us down." p. 65-66

The good news is that if we slow down, we'll see that the happiness, contentment, ease, peace, joy, and excitement that we think are only found on Saturday and Sunday or during vacation on some exotic island, aren't outside things at all. These are all emotions that are alive inside of us and that we can cultivate moment to moment. Does this mean that we'll never again have an awful Monday where nothing goes right, we're tired, and we want to be anywhere other than the office? No! But it does mean that even on those days we will be invited back to reality that even on our worst days, there is still 99.9% of satisfaction that we can look for. Find it!