A tale of mornings, Saturdays and beginnings

The Alma Writer #1 - A letter originally published on my Substack on April 1st 2023

My favourite days of the week are Mondays and Saturdays. What are yours?

Today is a Saturday and my body woke up earlier than it should have, in expectancy and hope for the day to come. I went to bed much later than I should have, reading, my mind racing, longing for tomorrow, as impatient and thrilled as a child before Christmas morning. The thing is, there is nothing special about Saturdays or Mondays in my world. There are no gifts to unwrap or magical appointments to look forward to. And yet, every single moment of those days feels like there are.

I wake up early and get to be outside, in the world, before anyone shows up to the party, their lives still, in dreamland, backwashed on the shore of late Friday evenings. I stride down to Portobello beach, I swiftly skitter to one of my favourite local coffeeshops and write or read for a couple of hours, I bounce to the library and run errands and I rush home to do some cleaning whilst listening to podcasts. On the outside, it’s a dull, normal Saturday. On the inside, it’s the most wonderful day of the week. Just around the corner, Monday brisks by, with a taste of work and vision mapping, a sweet delight for my inner visionary and CEO.

Monday is ruled by the Moon, the celestial body sovereign over our emotions, intuition, cycles and women. Saturday belongs to Saturn, ruler of responsibilities, organisation and limitations. Polar opposites, but in my heart and soul, they are one and the same, and I savour them with a sprinkle of possibilities, a touch of wonder and the bliss of surprises. My intuition governs on the free waves of Saturdays and my cartesian, structured brain runs wild on Mondays. An inversion, a collaboration, a discussion, a bridge of all parts of me stretching from one day to the next.

Nowadays, Mondays represents the pinacle of beginnings, and while most of us linger in the weekends energies and nostalgia of Sunday evenings, I’m already contemplating a new cycle opening. Saturday begins the weekend, bringing a cycle to an end, and already birthed anew. I love and relish beginnings - just like Marta in the TV show A girl and an astronaut - and I run away and struggle with endings. Sundays, stuck in-between, forgotten, foretold, unnoticed if I don’t shake them askew. Bringing projects to a close, saying goodbye, closing cycles, finding and accepting closure has always been something I grappled with. And yet, I have said thousands of goodbyes on the road of my life, in my nomadic travels and in my constant reinventions. Painfully, always carrying a flicker of hope for a new beginning. And yet, dragging the heavy weight of loose ends into a new life is never a good idea, doesn’t allow for smooth sailing or a brand and bright new beginning. There are nuances of course, nothing can be so linear nor clear cut, not even beginnings and endings, but it has never served me to not really finish, to not choose, to not decide, to not complete and close the door.

Rebirth can only happen after death.

In the first months of 2023, I closed many chapters. And yet, I’m still holding on to a few door handles a bit too tightly, all the while already on my way out. I don’t welcome or wish for endings, but I don’t want to drag their heaviness with me while I step through new portals and possibilities, nor let their energy drain me away from the wonderful surprises of newness and the unknown. Letting go happens with all doors closed and open at once. I published my first book. I finished the first draft of my novel. I let go of old patterns, structures, dreams and ideas. And from that space and that void, only then could I begin anew, only then could I be here, now.

I believe in lives unfolding one after the other ; death bringing about a new life. You can understand and conceptualise that as the cycle of life, the natural order of the world, a survival of the fittest metaphor or, as I choose to do, a faith in the idea of reincarnation. I’m quite happy to die when my time comes. And not, because I expect and believe in a new beginning on the other side. On the contrary, my tired soul, or my exhausted human, often wish for it to be its last hurrah. I’m okay with the future of my own death, because I will have lived so many new beginnings and so many deaths and endings till then, I will have rehearsed this game an unlimited amount of times, and I will be ready, most probably, for the biggest ending of them all, fulfilled, complete and open.

Completing a project, fulfilling a long-time dream, finding closure in relationships, publishing a book can feel, at times, once we get to it, underwhelming ; like a finish line that has been stretching, winding down for a long time, so expected, that it was rubbed down insignificant, small, unnecessary. And yet, in the void of the completion, in the celebration of the ending, twinkles the light of mornings, Mondays and new beginnings.

So tomorrow, I will try and honour Sunday as best as I can. An ending, a void for a new beginning and a Monday morning just around the corner, but also a celebration, a liberation in and of itself: the joy of finishing, or the road behind and the road ahead, and the blissful ignorance of how much time has passed or how much time is left. Because in the end, or in the beginning, there is only now, a bridge in-between time and expectations, dreams and disappointments, beginnings and ends.

And right now, standing in the middle of the bridge, on the shores of time, somewhere between life and death, a new era and an old cycle, I smile at the view, the journey, the lessons and aspirations, Mondays and Saturdays framing my calendar in loose bows and sparkly wrapping paper. And maybe, I can learn to find the magic in all the other days too.

For the end, is always the beginning.