😵‍💫 When Days Blur Together

Have you ever reached the end of a week and thought, "Wait, what happened to Tuesday?" Or found yourself feeling clueless when asked what you did yesterday?

If so, you're not alone. I've been thinking a lot lately about that ever-increasing phenomenon where my days blend together into an indistinguishable blur.

This feeling has become pretty common in my adult life. I wake up, check my phone, work, eat, scroll, sleep, and repeat. There aren't clear delineations between activities or memorable disruptions in my everyday routine, so my brain doesn't always bother to create distinct memory markers for each day.

The pandemic has amplified this for me. When my apartment became office, gym, restaurant, movie theater, and social venue all in one, the physical transitions that used to signal shifts in my days just kind of disappeared. I have no commute, no change of scenery, no random coffee shop encounters, just an endless stream of sameness day after day.

As much as I dislike dealing with, there's something both comforting and unsettling about this blurring of days. On one hand, there's a certain peaceful flow to life when it's moving smoothly. On the other hand, it can trigger an odd nagging feeling that life is slipping right through my fingers faster than I can grasp it.

So how do I combat this?

I like to create small rituals that distinguish one day from the next. This works wonders. Maybe Mondays are for fresh flowers from the market up the street. Maybe Wednesdays are the perfect day for a coffee from my favorite local cafe. Perhaps Fridays are a good time for ending my work week with a mini dance party.

Most importantly for me, practicing mindfulness helps transform ordinary moments into memorable ones. Fully experiencing my morning coffee rather than gulping it down while checking emails might seem like a trivial thing, but these small moments of awareness are what helps to create texture in my otherwise mundane days.

The blur isn't inherently good or bad, it's simply part of how time is experienced. Sometimes floating through a stretch of similar days can be peaceful. Other times require a marker of some kind to help me remember things.

So it goes.