These days it’s hard for me to gauge my feelings in an “objective” way. My days are always long and packed to the gills so whenever I have time to consider how I’m doing, how I’m feeling overall, I’m usually also dealing with more than a bit of exhaustion or stress or both from the daily grind.
What this means is that when I stop to think about what I’m doing with my life and where I’m headed, which is something I do naturally (although compulsively may be a better word), my thoughts are typically colored by all the tension that’s built up that day and that week as I do what needs to be done at home and at work, meeting deadlines, driving kids around, surviving.
I honestly feel so beaten down by the demands of adulthood at times that I just want to crawl into bed and hide from the world. I feel this especially after a really long day spent solving hard problems with no easy solutions. Everybody doesn’t win in those situations and there’s always blowback. Even if you did the right thing overall, there are people upset that they didn’t get what they wanted. That makes it tough to feel good about a job well done, especially in the moment.
But then there are Saturday evenings to offer a fresh perspective, or at least a fresher one. Oh how I love Saturday evenings! There’s no workday beforehand to rile up my emotions and tire me out, and there’s no workday the next morning to cause me stress in advance. Saturday evenings are so untainted (relatively speaking) by the rat race that I can take a moment to look out upon my life and think about it in a “purer” way, a more “objective” way.
And here’s the deal: when I consider my life on Saturday nights I feel good about it. I feel proud of the time I spend as an involved and supportive father and husband. I feel good about the work I’m doing and how it impacts the community.
What this also means is that when I feel this way on Saturday nights, I want to keep doing what I’m doing, at least for another week. I don’t want to make any big changes to my day to day. I don’t want to switch to a different career. I don’t want to crawl into bed permanently. And I certainly don’t want to be less involved as a dad either. No, I don’t want any of that. I want to keep going. Maybe there’re a few tweaks I need to make, but overall I’m good.
Keep in mind that a few days earlier, on Wednesday perhaps, I may have felt overcome with stress. It might’ve been a huge struggle for me to come down enough after work to be able to really relax with my family and focus on them instead of my inner chaos. It’s also possible, if not likely, that I never got there and instead just felt unsettled all night long as I tried, unsuccessfully, to unwind. This could’ve then rolled over into Thursday, with me feeling anxious the entire day as I took care of my responsibilities and did what needed to be done.
But then Saturday rolls around and I get a little bit of distance from the craziness, some perspective, and I can somehow make an honest assessment of these same circumstances and feel like it’s all worth it.
When I check in with myself like this I’ve started calling it the “Saturday evening meaning feeling.” It’s become an important gauge for me, although I don’t do it every week or on any set schedule. And oftentimes I don’t do it in any sort of formal way. It’ll just hit me, like when I hop in the shower before dinner on Saturday night. It’ll be a clear feeling in my chest about the big picture and my place in it.
Thankfully these Saturday evening check-ins have left me feeling good lately, and proud. I usually feel nostalgic too, and I always struggle with time slipping away, but on recent Saturday evenings I’ve been generally happy with how I’m handling things, with how I’m providing for my family, with my relationships.
This hasn’t always been the case. There have been many Saturday nights in the past where I’ve felt like I’m headed in the wrong direction, or I’m traveling with the wrong crew of companions, or I’m not getting the support I need (and also deserve). And the crazy thing is that sometimes I’d feel this way on Saturdays even when I was having a lot of fun in my life, much more fun than I’m having now. Maybe I wasn’t challenging myself enough, or I was holding back a part of myself that I was scared to share with the world. At those times the Saturday evening meaning feeling would tell me that a change is needed, and that’s ultimately led to big transformations in my life.
This practice has become super helpful for me and that’s why I’m writing about it now. Because if it’s helpful for me, I think it could be helpful for others too. We all need meaning and direction in our lives, but this is something we have to discover for ourselves. We need to listen to our hearts, closely. The Saturday evening meaning feeling gives us an opportunity to hear what our hearts are really telling us, as our feelings are less polluted then, less strained, and much clearer (even though they’re still unbelievably complex).
If we believe in what we’re doing and on Saturday nights we can honestly reaffirm those beliefs, then that simple act gives us encouragement to make it through the next set of challenges coming up in the next 7 days. Life is hard and you need to have strength and courage to keep moving forward, especially when you’re working through a demanding set of circumstances.
I have such a love-hate relationship with work. I truly love to do good work, but as I get older and more experienced the problems I work on have become much tougher to solve. They can be absolutely maddening! And these problems also might take months or more to figure out, requiring huge amounts of patience, persistence and biting your lip as you try to find a path forward.
At the same time I feel that doing good work is so important in this world. It’s rough out there, and there are many people with bad intentions, or selfish intentions, that make things even harder for everyone else. Showing up everyday, taking on hard problems, and helping to solve them in a way that benefits humanity is a noble act in my view. But there’s also the reality that if I’m not solving those problems, then maybe the person that steps up to do so won’t give a shit about anything beyond taking as much as they can for themselves. This is a real problem. There are too many people in the world looking out only for themselves and are more than willing to tear others down along the way, needlessly, unfairly.
So doing this good work, and also getting in the way so that others don’t try to weasel in and force bad outcomes, feels worth it, even if it makes me feel really stressed at times.
But how much stress is too much? At what point is the daily grind no longer worth it?
This is what I’ve been thinking about and feeling recently when I take stock of my Saturday evening meaning feeling. I honestly would rather not have to do all the work I sign up to do on a weekly basis, but I like the alternative even less. Because in an alternate world someone might take on those same responsibilities with less care, with less empathy. God forbid they’re also driven by some evil motive. I won’t sit on the sidelines anymore. There’s simply too much hate in the world. It’s such bullshit, it’s not helpful, and I won’t stand for it.
It’s Sunday morning as I write these words. Last night I once again felt alright about what I’m doing, but thoughts of tomorrow and the beginning of the work week are starting to creep in. I love my family of course and that will never change. My feelings about work are generally a roller coaster though. And the honest reality is that I’m going up and down with my feelings about work every day, multiple times a day, alternating between feeling content and dread and excitement and nervousness and many other sharp feelings high and low. It’s intense.
But I’m still okay with my Saturday evening meaning feeling, at least for now. Who knows what’ll happen and how I’ll feel about it over the next few days, but come next Saturday night I’ll be listening to my heart as deeply as I can once again.