Up
for It

By Tuesday the week has usually settled into its shape, and the shape is the same one it has held for months.

Calls from the first coffee onwards, the head already full of work before the body has left the bed, and still full of it well past midnight. None of this is a complaint. Nothing goes wrong in a week like that. It is simply full to the edges, in the way a suitcase is full, where nothing else fits no matter how you fold it.

I know exactly what loosens it, because it has never once failed to. A dinner with friends that runs long past the point where anyone is still hungry. A game of shuttle. Someone on the sofa who wants nothing from me except company. In years of doing this I cannot recall a single evening of that kind I came home from feeling worse than I left, and I would struggle to say that about anything else I do for myself.

And yet I almost never go.

The rule I lived by was a reasonable one. I would go when I was up for it, because nobody wants the friend who turns up tired and spends the evening checking his phone under the table. So I would wait for the week to loosen a little, for a day that had something left in it, and then I would make the call. It sounds like ordinary good manners, and for a long time I did not think of it as a rule at all.

The trouble is what that rule quietly does over a year. The week that most needs the evening is precisely the week that leaves nothing for it. The fun sits behind a door, the only key to that door is energy, and energy is the exact thing a full week takes from you. So the door stays shut in the weeks it was meant to open, and swings freely in the weeks you barely notice it. On a light week I did not need the evening, and on a heavy week I could not reach it. Without ever deciding to, I had arranged things so that I got the medicine only when I was not sick.

I ran that loop for the better part of a year before I could see it as a loop rather than as a series of individual weeks in which I happened to be tired.

The fix, when it came, was almost insulting in its simplicity. I put the evening on the calendar first, before the week had a chance to fill. Not "let us meet sometime", which is the sentence friendships die of, but a day, a court booked for shuttle, and a couple of friends who said yes to it. Then the day arrived in the middle of a week every bit as full as the ones before, and I was not up for it, and I went anyway, for no better reason than that it was on the calendar and I am the sort of person who keeps the calendar.

My wife tagged along, and somewhere between the second game and the third the evening stopped being something I was attending and became something I was in. We played badly and argued about the score, we laughed at rallies that did not deserve it, and afterwards nobody was in a hurry to go home. Nothing about the evening was special, which is exactly the point. I woke the next morning tired in the legs and light everywhere else. The rest of the week did not get any easier, but it became noticeably easier to carry, and that turned out to be the difference I had been waiting a year for.

What I had backwards was the order of things. I had been treating the evening as a reward for finishing the week, something you earn by getting through it, when it is not the prize at the end at all but the thing that gets you to the end. You do not wait until you are rested to sleep.

There is a version of this observation that sounds like a productivity tip, and I want to be careful here, because that is not what I mean. I am not scheduling fun in order to become more efficient at work on the other side of it. I am scheduling it because "when I feel like it" turned out to be an elegant way of never doing it, and I was not willing to lose the one thing that has never let me down.

So the new rule is a plain one: one evening every two or three weeks, placed on the calendar before the week begins, with my mood not consulted. Some of those evenings I will walk in flat and walk out flat, and that is fine, because the rule was never that every evening would be wonderful. The rule is only that "up for it" no longer gets a vote.

If there is something in your life that helps every single time and you have not done it in a while, it is worth checking whether you have hung a door on it without noticing. Then it is worth checking who holds the key.