Angie McMahon // Beginner
Post by Misha //
There’s this philosophy in Miranda July’s novel All Fours which is described as “every day is Tuesday.” It’s said by one of the characters (a very famous fictional pop star, possibly meant to be Beyoncé) to explain that she does not schedule her time by days of the week, but rather by when she feels able or inclined to do things. Days of the week are meaningless to her as scheduling devices. Every day is Tuesday.
At the time that I read the book, this concept, which comes up several times throughout the story, struck me as a little too cute. Yes, of course we all experience fluctuations in our capacities to complete certain tasks, and yes, for a few people with ample resources and uncommonly flexible work environments it might make sense to organize one’s life around these fluctuations, but for most of us, Tuesday does, unfortunately, continue to exist within fairly stringent temporal bounds.
But months later, “every day is Tuesday,” is the part of the book that has stuck to me. I think about it every time I notice the waxings and wanings of my energy, creative output, quality of work, or social capacity, all of which has very little to do with the cycles of the weeks or months and much more to do with cycles of the body, the seasons, and the natural world.
Last week, for instance, I could hardly open my eyes when my alarm went off. I dragged myself through the days, let dishes pile up, struggled to find the energy to pour cereal for dinner. Yesterday, for no apparent reason at all, I woke up before my alarm, spent all day working in the garden, did laundry, made a batch of kimchi, went for a walk, and only stopped because it got too dark outside to keep digging in the flower beds.
“Every day is Tuesday” isn’t really a prescription for how to live your life – the world we live in is far too invested in standardizing productivity for that to be a practical solution for most of us – but it is a good reminder that people are meant to work and live cyclically. Those cycles aren’t arbitrary; they can’t be governed by the seven days of the week or any other contrived system of timekeeping. They’re determined by the rich interworking of our bodies, daylight, temperature, and mysteries of natural inclination too complex to assign to any measurable phenomenon.
It’s important to remember that every day can be Tuesday, I think, in a world that makes us feel that we should be operating as machines do – with switches set in either the on or off position. Any slow down or loss of productivity a symptom of failure to be corrected with proper adjustments to inputs such as sleep, food, medicine. If every day is Tuesday, then perhaps we are not machines, and our cycles belong to us, not to the calendar.
Stream Angie McMahon’s Light Sides here on all the services and buy more of her music here.