Monday Blues & Moodswings
Car smells make me sick. I don’t know if it’s the upholstery or the closed space or the stale air- something about cars with windows pulled shut remind me of the discomfort of movement, the uncertainty of the road, the sense of displacement from home.
That’s a little bit ironic, because I love cars and cabs (who doesn’t?) and sometimes on a car trip I’ve wished for the road to continue so the solitude of vacant thought would linger, and the comfort of moving scenery provide distraction from the spaceless, static finality of destination.
My favourite kind of road is the one that runs through lines of dense, leafy trees to infinity on a cloudy spring day with a light wind carrying just the hint of a drizzle.
There seems to be less and less of those nowadays.
I think car smells are the strongest on Monday mornings. Or maybe the body is just extra sensitive after the weekend. I read somewhere that general depression levels in a population increases on Monday mornings. Makes me wonder what we are doing here on this planet, and to what end? For if all we do is exist through days, weeks, months and years of unhappiness, what ends do our means justify?
Last Monday I cried in the car, the weekend’s trapped car smell roiling in the pit of my stomach tasting of failure. But then, the world somehow righted itself. I wasn’t happy, but I could be. My brain didn’t have to listen to my olfactory nerves. It could drink in the rain-soaked Amazons, drown in the rushing song of a mountain river or gaze at the sun rising in a different world. It could dance to a favourite song. I scavenged for moments of joy, the flavor of morning tea, the comfort of cool water splashed across the face, something a friend said, a phrase of beauty, someone’s smile- and the day rolled on. On the way back home, I found myself humming a tune. If there’s a map to the Happy Kingdom, I haven’t found it yet. But I tell myself that I’m on my way, that I can find my way, and that is enough. Perhaps the means can justify itself after all. I dream of a day when the means and the ends can be the one and same thing, so walking isn’t a constant rushing, endless racing towards a goal.
But what I hate even more than closed spaces or a ticking clock is waiting, the standing at bus-stops, waiting indefinitely for erratic buses to lead us to our goals the way we wait for an erratic fate to take erratic actions in our lives of waiting. And I am done waiting for endless Monday mornings. I’ll let my mind wander amongst forests picking miracles amongst fallen leaves. There will be long days, and bad days but in the smog there will be pockets of oxygen, built atom by atom, word by word of poetry and song and loving myself. And who knows, I may even make a miracle.
As a friend said on Instagram- “There are a lot of lights in the city, they are almost blinding but not quite, since we make our way home every day.”
Thanks for reading. Spread the love.
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That’s a little bit ironic, because I love cars and cabs (who doesn’t?) and sometimes on a car trip I’ve wished for the road to continue so the solitude of vacant thought would linger, and the comfort of moving scenery provide distraction from the spaceless, static finality of destination.
My favourite kind of road is the one that runs through lines of dense, leafy trees to infinity on a cloudy spring day with a light wind carrying just the hint of a drizzle.
There seems to be less and less of those nowadays.
I think car smells are the strongest on Monday mornings. Or maybe the body is just extra sensitive after the weekend. I read somewhere that general depression levels in a population increases on Monday mornings. Makes me wonder what we are doing here on this planet, and to what end? For if all we do is exist through days, weeks, months and years of unhappiness, what ends do our means justify?
Last Monday I cried in the car, the weekend’s trapped car smell roiling in the pit of my stomach tasting of failure. But then, the world somehow righted itself. I wasn’t happy, but I could be. My brain didn’t have to listen to my olfactory nerves. It could drink in the rain-soaked Amazons, drown in the rushing song of a mountain river or gaze at the sun rising in a different world. It could dance to a favourite song. I scavenged for moments of joy, the flavor of morning tea, the comfort of cool water splashed across the face, something a friend said, a phrase of beauty, someone’s smile- and the day rolled on. On the way back home, I found myself humming a tune. If there’s a map to the Happy Kingdom, I haven’t found it yet. But I tell myself that I’m on my way, that I can find my way, and that is enough. Perhaps the means can justify itself after all. I dream of a day when the means and the ends can be the one and same thing, so walking isn’t a constant rushing, endless racing towards a goal.
But what I hate even more than closed spaces or a ticking clock is waiting, the standing at bus-stops, waiting indefinitely for erratic buses to lead us to our goals the way we wait for an erratic fate to take erratic actions in our lives of waiting. And I am done waiting for endless Monday mornings. I’ll let my mind wander amongst forests picking miracles amongst fallen leaves. There will be long days, and bad days but in the smog there will be pockets of oxygen, built atom by atom, word by word of poetry and song and loving myself. And who knows, I may even make a miracle.
As a friend said on Instagram- “There are a lot of lights in the city, they are almost blinding but not quite, since we make our way home every day.”
Thanks for reading. Spread the love.
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