By Dr Ayodele Renner
Who on earth (or in heaven) crated Mondays? The person owes us all a lifetime of profuse apologies.
There is no museum exhibition for the strange person who wakes up on a Monday morning with the cheery disposition of Mary Poppins, spoonful of sugar in hand, ready to skip and hop gleefully through the week. The simple reason for this is that the discovery of such a person would be the most revolutionary finding in science since E=MC2.
January, for all intents and purposes, is the Monday of the year. After what we would all consider the long weekend of the year, December, delightful food; exciting drinks, spending more money than we actually have, we find ourselves faced with the Monday of the year: the very menacing January.
By Sunday evening the sheer dread of Monday traffic and the travails of work have come upon you: same with January. By December 27th, after Christmas has cleared from your eye (as we say in these parts), you realise that the longest month of the year is smiling at you and your depleted bank account. There will be school fees to pay, rent to sort out, bills to settle and resolutions not to keep.
This phenomenon of Lunaediesophobia may stem from the fact that in our formal education system, Mondays portended the coming of some horrible test, the day of a submission of some homework you didn’t touch all weekend, the day exam start, the day the term began after a long holiday and a list of other unpleasant things you were certain you didn’t want to happen to you
While you may be familiar with the vexations of the start of the week and the year, the above just served as a reminder in case I was the only one who had not forgotten.
That being said, Mondays and January, while simply being arbitrary temporal transition points created by people, give us the opportunity to begin afresh.
They seem to make us more willing to plan, more eager to achieve goals and more invigorated for the week and the year. Yes, they come with their own unique blend of worries, but it means that we must plan to circumvent these woes.
No one ever writes a plan for the week on Wednesday or one for the year in June. It all happens in Monday and in January.
So, in 2019, hug January with all its long 45 days (as it seems to most of us) with a big smile and a warm embrace, because you know that it has brought a clean slate in a manner of speaking.
Look at Mondays and say, “I hope you had a great weekend”, and plan the week every Monday as though it were the start of a new year.
Mondays and Januarys are not the enemy. They just want to be loved like December and Friday and so they should; because they mark the starting line of a race to become a better version of oneself.
So, let’s start wishing each other happy Monday on every Monday in 2019. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give you a refund.
Happy new Year HH people.
