It descends, normally, between around 5pm and 7.30pm and can be at its height at six,
especially when the weather is turning and the last of the daylight has burnished the
sky a shade of crimson pink. The Sunday evening feeling is ordinarily associated with work,
and the idea of going back to an office after a pleasant break. But this doesn’t quite
cover the complexity of what is going on: it isn’t just that we have some sort of
work to do that is dragging down our mood, but that we are going back to the wrong sort
of work even while we are in dire ignorance of what the right sort of work might actually
be. We all have inside us what we might term a true working self, a set of inclinations
and capacities that long to exert themselves on the raw material of reality. We want to
turn the vital bits of who we are into jobs, and ensure that we can see ourselves reflected
in the services and products we are involved in turning out. This is what we understand
by the right job, and the need for one is as fundamental and as strong in us as the
need to love. We can be as broken by a failure to find our professional destiny as to identify
an intimate companion. Feeling that we are in the wrong job, and that our true vocation
lies undiscovered, is not a minor species of discomfort: it will be the central existential
crisis of our lives. We normally manage to keep the insistent calls of the true working
self at bay during the week. We are too busy and too driven by an immediate need for money.
But it reliably comes to trouble us on Sunday evenings. Like a ghost suspended between two
worlds, it has not been allowed to live or to die, and so bangs at the door of consciousness,
requiring resolution. We are sad, or panicked, because a part of us recognises that time
is running out and that we are not presently doing what we should with what remains of
our lives. The anguish of Sunday evening is our conscience trying to stir us inarticulately
into making more of ourselves. In this sense, Sunday evenings have a history. Until recently,
the last hundred years or so, there was – for most of us – no question of our true working
selves ever finding expression in our labours. We worked to survive and would be grateful
for a minimal income. But such reduced expectations no longer hold. We know – because there
are enough visible examples of people who have done so – that we could harness our
talents to the engines of commerce. We know that we don’t have to be unhappy in this
area, which adds a feeling of particular shame if we still are. We should not be so hard
on ourselves. We don’t yet have the mechanisms in place to reunite ourselves with our purpose.
It is in the nature of our working selves to be both clear in their dissatisfactions
and yet maddeningly oblique about their real direction. We can both be utterly sure that
we are not doing what we should while wholly at sea about our genuine purpose. The answer
is patience, structure and steadfast intent. We need some of the discipline of the detective,
or an archaeologist reassembling the pieces of a smashed jar. We should not dismiss our
angst blithely as ‘the Sunday blues’, to be assuaged with a drink and a film. We
should see it as belonging to a confused yet utterly central search for a real self that
has been buried under a need to please others and take care of short-term needs for status
and money. In other words, we should not keep our Sunday evening feelings simply for Sunday
evenings. We should place these feelings at the center of our lives and let them be the
catalysts for a sustained exploration that continues throughout the week, over months
and probably years, and that generates conversations with ourselves, with friends, mentors and
with professionals. Something very serious is going on when sadness and anxiety descend
for a few hours on Sunday evenings. We aren’t a bit bothered to have to end two days of
leisure; we’re being driven usefully to distraction by a reminder to try to discover
who we really are – and to do justice to our true talents – before it is too late.It
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