"Have a nice weekend," the checkout clerk said on a Friday afternoon.
Her casual comment got me thinking about my weekend plans: laundry, clean the garage, deal with the piled-up mail, car oil change. Return library books, wash windows, put out the recycling, get a ladder and change that burned out light bulb. Gym, fix the leaky faucet, bank, haircut. Not to mention answering the 200 emails in my inbox, picking up the dry cleaning.
So, much as I'd like to follow her advice, I'm just too busy to have a nice weekend.
And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know crams too much into their weekends. Between a full-time job and a part-time life, weekends end up filled with errands there's no other time for. But even so-called recreational activities are high-pressure. Binge watch all those TV shows I need to catch up on, work up a sweat at the gym, plow through the ginormous Sunday New York Times, make a dent in my Netflix queue. Honestly, it's a statement about our culture that running in a marathon can be considered a leisure-time activity. Weekends are so tiring, I'm beginning to feel relieved when Monday rolls around. When did weekends become the new weekdays?
That clerk's comment has me realizing what I'm forgetting to add to my ever-expanding, never-checked-off, must-get-done-this-weekend list: relax.