"That part of life that we really live is short." - A quote
We divided the week into weekdays and weekends. Eversince I was little, I have always been told to sleep early and not to watch too much TV. But during our school and college days, the weeks were even more interesting than the weekends and we all know why..During those evenings, I used to go out regularly to meet my friends or my friends would come to my house or there were always some neighbour kids dying to play and we made absolutely no efforts to plan our evenings.
Now comes the adulthood where we will all be working atleast for the next 30 or 40 years except some lucky ones like the lottery winners, housewives and househusbands, etc. Now the weekdays become a routine and the weekends are never enough to do whatever you want to do as part of enjoyment in life.
The thing that worked for me is not going home directly from the office. Once you enter your house, there are nice things which pulls you to the hibernating mode like the sofa, the TV, the heater, your laptop (with all your friends social networks esp with their statuses in green), homemade dinner and the list goes on. At the end, you wind up sitting in front of your laptop, watch TV in the background, eat and sleep. To plan an evening like this does not need any effort and we can call it a "routine" or "default" evenings of our lives. Who wants a default thing when we can customize? The fact that the majority of the population are contented with this lifestyle filled with lazy distractions does not mean that its a normal and an accepted way of life. I honestly do not understand people who say that they are too tired after work to come out and enjoy their evenings and they should do really something about it.
When we work for 8 or 9 hours a day which we can call achievement of the day, we deserve an hour or 2 of daily enjoyment. Why do we postpone or wait to celebrate our everyday joys exclusively on weekends? Why can't we do that daily or atleast twice or thrice during the weekdays? There are always periods in your lifetime when you can't plan your evenings as we do now, like when you have babies, when you are sick or retired or too old or too busy with your work, etc. But even during these periods, all you need is the will to go out.
To sum up, the idea of just doing something in the evenings is the key here, especially outside of your house. If you are in Paris or elsewhere in the world, all the evenings are the same and its upto you to go out and make yours memorable. The next time you come out on a Monday for a music concert, Tuesday for yoga or swimming, Wednesday for a French play, Thursday for a movie, Friday for a big party and Saturday for dinner, then please note that you are not alone and there are people out there enjoying and balancing everyday of their lives. If you do that, it gives you around 900 hours of enjoyment per year. But 2 hours per Saturday for 50 Saturdays in a year gives you 100 hours of enjoyment for a total of 8800 hours in that year. Do you really think its balanced? Non, pas du tout!
