I've been trying something different with my Sundays lately. Instead of letting them become an extension of the workweek or a rushed preparation for Monday, I've been setting them aside for something I'm calling "Spiritual Sundays." The name makes it sound more structured than it really is, but essentially, it's a day where I try not to work, read something spiritual (currently Kai Cheng Thom's "Falling Back in Love with Being Human"), do some decluttering, and spend time with the thoughts I've collected throughout the week.
I've been doing it for a little while now. If you ask me how it changed my life, I doubt I can answer. The impacts aren't as tangible as I sometimes wish they were. It's not like implementing a new goal-tracking system where you can point to specific changes. Instead, it's more like watching seasons change - you know it's happening, but it's difficult to capture the exact moment when winter becomes spring.
Throughout the week, I keep a running list of things to reflect on during my Sunday Reflection hour. Sometimes, they're big questions about life and purpose; sometimes, they're small observations that felt significant at the moment. When Sunday comes, I sit with these collected thoughts. Not to solve them necessarily but to give them space to exist without immediately trying to fix or understand everything. I sometimes write about them (typing in Notion, for the process-obsessed) or even open a chat with Claude. I find the AI to be an extremely available partner for even the most random discussions.
Some Sundays, the reading makes me think and coincides beautifully with these collected thoughts, and I get a good blog post or a bud of an essay that I may or may not someday develop. Sometimes, though, nothing works, and I find myself either reading my "work book" or actually writing that blog post or even checking emails. Those Sundays are more disjointed, and I usually feel robbed somehow—which is how I know the practice has an effect.
What fascinates me is how much resistance I sometimes feel to this simple act of pausing. Even though I've chosen this practice, even though I can feel its benefits somewhere beneath the surface of my consciousness, there's still that voice that whispers, "Shouldn't you be doing something?"
Maybe that's the real practice here—not the reading, decluttering, or even the reflection, but the ongoing experiment of learning to trust that not everything needs to be measured, quantified, or immediately useful. In a world that constantly demands clear outcomes and measurable results, there might be something radical about creating space for something less defined.
For now, I'm continuing this experiment, paying attention to what emerges and trying to make peace with the fact that some of the most important changes happen too slowly to notice in real-time. Like watching a garden grow, you can't see the actual moment of transformation, but somehow, week by week, something new takes shape.