The blissful no-plans Sunday
A small letter on the practice of keeping one Sunday a month entirely unplanned — and on what the small radical act of having nothing on the calendar does for the rest of the month.
Dear reader,
Today is one of those Sundays — the small once-a-month Sunday that I keep, by deliberate practice, completely empty of any plan. No appointments. No commitments. No expectations. No agenda for the day except whatever the day, as it unfolds, decides it wants to be.
I am writing this from the small chair by the window. It is just after eleven in the morning. I have, so far, done nothing notable today. I woke without an alarm. I made tea slowly. I read a few pages of a book I have been working through for weeks. I did about twenty minutes of slow stretching on the bedroom floor. I have, by all reasonable standards, accomplished nothing. The day is going wonderfully.
What an empty Sunday does
Several things, more important than I had once appreciated. The first is structural. An empty Sunday, sitting in the middle of the month, becomes the small dependable point that the rest of the month is, in some way, organised around. Knowing that the second Sunday is empty makes the third Tuesday's busy schedule more bearable. The other Sundays can be busier, more social, more useful. The one empty Sunday holds the rest of the month in shape.
The second is psychological. The accumulated small decisions of a normal day — what to do next, what to attend to, what to skip, what to prioritise — produce a small chronic cognitive load that, over a busy month, can become substantial. The empty Sunday removes the cognitive load entirely. There are no decisions to make. The day is allowed to be whatever it is. The relief, by Sunday evening, is real.
The third is biological. The body, given a full day with no schedule, finds the small rhythms it would naturally follow if life would allow it. The eating happens when the body is hungry rather than when the calendar says lunch. The resting happens when the body is tired rather than at the small approved nap-times. The walking happens when the body wants to move rather than when the meeting requires the walk to the office. The small biological recalibration of a fully unstructured day is, in some way, the closest thing to a small portable retreat that ordinary life can offer.
On the small protection of the empty Sunday
The hardest part is not the doing of nothing. The hardest part is the small ongoing protection of the empty day against the small reasonable claims that life will, week after week, try to place on it. A friend will, with the best of intentions, propose a brunch. A family member will mention an event. A small useful errand will, in the planning stage, seem reasonable to slot into the empty day.
All of these, in my own practice, get gently deferred to a different Sunday. The empty Sunday is, by rule, empty. The rule is what protects the day from the small constant pull of the calendar. Without the rule, the empty Sunday would fill in within a few weeks, and the small structural support it provides for the rest of the month would dissolve.
If you have not kept an empty day this way, try it for three months. One Sunday per month, fully protected, with nothing on the calendar except the small permission to do whatever the body and the day are asking for. The cumulative effect, after three months, will, in my own experience, make a small clear case for itself.
Until next month,
M.