The Weekend Piece
The letter that follows is brief. The form is old. Older than corporate self-improvement by about nineteen centuries. Marcus Aurelius wrote his to himself on a campaign tent on the Danube, between one war and the next, with no readers in mind, in a Greek that he was not even sure would survive him. He called the collection Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, To himself. We translate it as Meditations because we are uncomfortable with the literal title. The literal title is a small embarrassment, because it admits, without rhetoric, that an adult can need to write to himself in order to remember who he had decided to be that morning.
What follows is a Saturday-evening attempt at the same exercise, in a much smaller register, and on much less heroic stakes.
Letter
Dear me,
I am writing to you this weekend piece because, during the week, I did not have time to talk to you. I left you there, on stand-by, like a notification one does not want to open.
I owe you an apology.
I am sorry for waking you up at six without asking if you felt like it.
I am sorry for filling you with meetings you could not even remember the day after.
I am sorry for telling you a hundred times “tonight I will stop early”, and for never keeping the promise.
I am sorry for the quick dinners, the standing coffees, the book on the bedside table still on page forty-seven, identical for three weeks.
I am sorry for not calling your cousin. Nor your sister. Nor the friend who has been waiting for three months. Nor your wife, who has been patiently waiting for months for you to have a free moment for her too.
I will not forgive myself for not having, not even this week, five minutes to spend with you. For not taking the long bath. For not looking out of the window without thinking about anything. For not eating slowly. For never turning off the phone.
Five minutes, my dear. I promised them to you in January. I postponed them in February, in March, in April. Now it is June. I owe you thirty-two weeks of five minutes, and the interest is not paid in productivity hacks.
Tonight, at least, we toast. You, me, and all the time we did not give each other.
To you.
The oldest exercise we keep forgetting
Writing to oneself is not an act of literature. It is an act of accounting. It is what a serious adult does, periodically, when the gap between who they decided to be and what they actually did in the week starts producing a sound only they can hear.
Marcus Aurelius did it on a wooden plank, in a frozen tent, at the head of a Roman army he did not entirely want to lead. He was the most powerful man in the known world. He had no reason to address himself in writing, in private, in a language not even his own. He did it anyway. He wrote, τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, to himself, because the day had been long and the man inside the emperor needed to be reminded that the emperor would, sooner or later, die, and that the only thing that survives a life of office is the integrity of small daily choices.
Seneca did the same thing, in a different posture. The Epistulae morales ad Lucilium were addressed nominally to a friend, but Seneca was honest enough to admit that the real addressee was the version of himself he was trying to become. The letter to a friend is, in the Stoic tradition, a polite cover for the letter to oneself.
Petrarch repeated the operation in the Secretum, staging a dialogue with Augustine that was, in fact, a long conversation between Petrarch the worldly and Petrarch the disciplined.
Montaigne did away with the cover altogether and called it Essais, attempts at himself, a body of writing whose announced purpose was to draw an honest portrait of one mind to itself.
Pessoa, much later, in a Lisbon storeroom, kept the Livro do Desassossego as a daily ledger of small interior failures, postponements, recognitions. He never published it. He did not need to.
The line is long. It is, in fact, one of the most consistent lines in Western thought, with a few side branches in the Far East. The technique is always the same: you sit down at the end of the day, or the week, and you say, in writing, what you owe yourself. You make a small inventory of the promises kept and the promises not kept. You apologise. You forgive what can be forgiven. You refuse to forgive what would be cheap to forgive. You stand up.
This is the exercise of the letter. Marcus did it. Seneca did it. We have, in the past decade, replaced it with a subscription to Headspace.
The apologies one ought to make
The apologies in the letter above are, on purpose, small and concrete. The bath not taken. The window not looked out of. The phone not switched off. They are deliberately not the apologies of the wellness industry, which tend to be metaphysical: “for not having lived in the present”, “for not having been mindful”, “for having ignored my inner voice”. Those apologies are easy because they do not commit anyone to anything. Nobody can be held accountable for not having been mindful at three on a Tuesday afternoon.
A bath not taken, on the contrary, is exact. It happened on a precise evening. It would have lasted thirty-five minutes. It would have cost almost nothing. It did not happen because the inbox grew faster than the heater could fill the tub. The shape of the apology, here, is the shape of the missed opportunity. The smaller, the more accurate. The more accurate, the more uncomfortable.
The same logic holds for the calls not made. There is a difference between I have neglected my relationships and I have not called my cousin on Wednesday at seven, when she was waiting for the call. The first formulation is morally generic. The second is a fact. Adults, in private, do better with facts than with morals.
Marcus called this the prosokhe, the attentive vigilance over one’s own daily conduct. He did not call it self-improvement. He did not call it growth. He called it the simple obligation of a free person to keep account of what they had done with their hours.
What we refuse to forgive
The letter has one shift, almost imperceptible. After the apologies, the tone changes without warning: it is no longer apologising, it is refusing to forgive. I will not forgive myself for not having had, not even this week, five minutes to spend with myself. The absence of a connector between the two halves is deliberate. A formal transition (“but there is one thing I will not apologise for”) would lie: there is not one thing, there are several, and announcing them as one would be the kind of rhetorical tidiness this kind of letter is built to avoid.
This is the harder part. The point is not that five minutes a day is a discipline of well-being to be adopted. The point is that the very promise of five minutes a day, made at the beginning of the year, has now been broken thirty-two weeks in a row. The compound interest of that broken promise is no longer made of five-minute units. It is made of weeks. Weeks turn into months, months into the realisation, around June, that one no longer knows how to sit still without picking up the phone.
The vocabulary of productivity has a word for this state: it calls it resilience. It is the wrong word. It is the word that an organisation uses to describe a worker who has lost the ability to recover, and who has therefore become indistinguishable, in operational terms, from one who never needed to. Resilience, in this corporate sense, is the elegant name for being functional in spite of oneself.
The vocabulary of psychoanalysis has a different word for the same state: it calls it self-abandonment. The two words sit on the same desk. The first one comes home in a binder. The second one comes home at three in the morning when one wakes for no reason and realises one does not know what one did with the day before.
Marcus would have called it, more directly, failure to be present to oneself. He would not have written a book about it. He would have written, in his notebook, three lines on a winter evening, and gone back the next morning to govern an empire.
Why we cannot find the time
It is fair to ask why this state has become so common. The honest answer has at least three layers.
The first layer is the structure of contemporary time. Work has spread evenly into the day. Evenings absorb residual meetings. Weekends absorb the slack of the week. Holidays absorb the catching-up of the year. There is, materially, less unoccupied time in an average professional’s calendar than there was thirty years ago, even when measured generously. The five minutes one owes oneself compete with notifications that arrive in real time and that, by their very design, cannot wait without producing a small spike of anxiety.
The second layer is the structure of contemporary listening. Adult relationships are rich in exchanges but poor in listening. People talk, reply, react, rarely stop. The machine, instead, seems to stop. It seems to read all the way down. For the first time, we have a tool that mimics the behaviour we are most thirsty for, and we have learned to substitute the simulation for the original. We talk to the assistant on the phone because the assistant on the phone has the one quality our peers no longer have: it appears to be paying attention.
The third layer is the structure of contemporary self-image. We have been taught, since school, that an honest measure of a person is the quantity of useful output produced per unit of time. The criterion is foreign to a Stoic, who would have measured a life by the proportion of choices made consistently with one’s announced ethics. By the productivity criterion, the five minutes of quiet are at best dead time, at worst an admission of weakness. By the Stoic criterion, they are the only minutes that count.
We have therefore inherited, in adulthood, the impossibility of granting ourselves five minutes that we cannot account for to anyone.
The toast
The letter ends with a toast. Tonight, at least, we toast. This is also old. Marcus would not have used the word. He would have, more sobrely, said that the day was over and that the work could be put down. But the gesture is the same. You acknowledge, in a small ritual, that the day has been what it has been, that you were the one who lived it, that there is a small distance between who you wanted to be and who you actually were that day, and that the distance does not have to be closed tonight.
The toast is not a happy ending. It is a small ritual that recognises an injury without pretending to heal it. Self-reconciliation is not a Saturday evening epiphany. The injury of thirty-two weeks of broken promises is not undone by a glass on the balcony. The injury can be acknowledged, in adult terms, between two people who happen to share the same body. That is, in the end, what a Saturday-evening letter can accomplish. Not redemption. Acknowledgement.
It is a small thing. It is more than most weeks contain.
A note for those reading this on a LinkedIn feed
You are probably reading this on a phone, between the dishes and the news. You have your own letter to write. You have your own five minutes that have been postponed since January. You have someone who has been waiting for a call, a partner you have been postponing, an old friend who has stopped texting because they know you will not reply.
I am not writing this letter to make you feel guilty. The corporate genre of “weekend reflection” is, more often than not, a polite form of guilt-tripping disguised as inspiration. The opposite is intended here. I am writing this letter to ask you, just for the duration of this Saturday evening, to stop being a colleague of yourself.
There will be time, on Monday morning, to be a colleague again. The whole machine will start again. The notifications, the meetings, the dinners eaten standing, the books frozen at page forty-seven. They are not going anywhere.
For tonight, only tonight, give yourself the five minutes of January.
To you.
A short note on the day in between
Tomorrow will be Sunday. The light at six is already, in June, a clean and indifferent light. It will find you in the same place. The phone will know your name. By Monday the first meeting will know your role. Almost nothing will have changed.
Almost. One thing will have changed. You will know that, on a Saturday evening, you wrote yourself a letter and you did not pretend everything was fine. It is a small fact. It does not solve the calendar. It does not free up Tuesday afternoon. It does not make those who wait for you stop waiting. But it is the only fact that, this week, you owe to yourself, and that you can actually deliver.
You have one whole Sunday ahead, before Monday calls. Use one of its hours for the bath. Use another for the call you have been postponing. Use a third for nothing at all. None of these hours will appear in any productivity report. They will, however, count toward the only ledger that matters and that nobody else keeps for you.
Tonight, the letter is enough. Tomorrow, the day is yours.
To you.
Sources, references, debts
- Marcus Aurelius, Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν (Meditations), composed circa 161-180 AD on the Danube frontier. Standard English edition: Penguin Classics, translated by Martin Hammond, 2006.
- Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, composed circa 64 AD. Standard English edition: Loeb Classical Library, translated by Richard M. Gummere.
- Francesco Petrarca, Secretum, composed 1347-1353. Standard Italian edition: Mondadori, edited by Enrico Fenzi.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essais, first edition 1580. Standard French edition: Pléiade, Gallimard.
- Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, posthumous, first compiled edition 1982. Standard English edition: Penguin Classics, translated by Richard Zenith.
- Umberto Galimberti, L’ospite inquietante (Feltrinelli, 2007), on the absence of self-relation in the late-modern subject.
- Massimo Recalcati, L’uomo senza inconscio (Raffaello Cortina, 2010), on the structure of self-abandonment in a culture of constant performance.
- Zygmunt Bauman, Vita liquida (Laterza, 2006), on the impossibility of slow time in a society engineered for permanent acceleration.
- Personal correspondence with myself, irregular, scarce, often postponed.
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