Monday Motivation on this September Morning

It is Monday morning, I am up super early because, one, it is a new work week and two, I have to beat the Monday morning traffic because this is the first day of the new academic school year. I didn’t write yesterday and I feel strange having not posted anything. I spend my Sunday in a kind of haze of sadness, longing, despair balanced by a sense that I ought to be doing more, but not having the energy or the wherewithal to actually do anything.

I spent most of the morning in bed, reading.   I was caught up in the fictional lives of Hortenisa James and Marion Agostino, two eighty year old women living in the middle class suburban Cape Town, who find themselves widowed and miserable, contemplating their lives and all that did they wrong. The characters were well developed, interesting and funny and they were two of the most nasty, mean spirited fierce old women I have ever encountered. I can’t recall having read a book before where the protagonists were elderly women, or the elderly at all in fact. Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door occupied my thoughts all of Sunday. This is not a book review by the way. The Stories of Chantel DaCosta and all bookish topics remain a Wednesday afternoon conversation.

But having spent my morning with these ladies contemplating their lives, close to the end of their lives, I felt the need to reflect on my own journey and think and also connect. So around 1′ o clock, I visited my elderly neighbour, and we spend the afternoon indulging on one of our favourite pastimes,  sipping rum punch and chatting about the good ole days.  For my neighbour who likes to say he is over 75, his days are anywhere from 1966 through to the late 1990s, and for me, 1998 to circa 2008. We chatted, reminisced about the summer of 2008, when we met and used to spend hours on Sundays drinking rum punch and snacking until we were tipsy.

The Sunday afternoon chat was a great distraction, but then at around 4 o’ clock it was time to return home and to Sunday tasks still undone. There was the unfolded laundry, the clothes that needed to be sorted out and  ironed, meal prep, Sunday self-care and all that had to be done so that I could be at work early on this Monday morning.

Here are my main thoughts today, if something needs to be done, just do it, do it now, get it done, and avoid procrastination, it is a killer. Procrastination is a killer of Sunday afternoon essays, it destroys evening quiet time (I went to bed after 11 p.m. mainly because I am very slow at ironing clothes), and a killer of dreams (I was supposed to be writing Sunday).

It is a new week, a fresh start, have a great day, an amazing week. Be orgainsed, stay focused and if you get off track, just pick yourself up and get going again.

Happy Monday.