Mondays are hectic, no?  I always find Monday to be a bit of a whirlwind, especially if the weekend has been full of blissful, unstructured downtime.  I just had one of those weekends- a weekend of yard work and flag football, pop-over guests and walks downtown.  Those are the weekends that fill me up and remind me yet again that it’s the simple things that mean the most (The Disease of Being Busy, remember?).  So when the routines of a Monday come back into play, it takes my sensitive side a bit of time to catch up.

I’ve been lucky to have a career with flexibility, and the benefit of fitting in my work around my life, instead of the reverse.  My practice has changed and evolved as my family’s needs have changed and evolved, and it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve gone back to working more of a full-time schedule.  For me, that means that for the past two years, Mondays look like this:

• 8:25am: walk to school drop-off
• 9:00am: CrossFit or hot yoga
• 10:00am: the world’s fastest shower
• 11:00am-2:30pm: Burlington Sports & Spine Clinic
• 2:30-3:30pm: walk to school pickup
• 3:30-7:00pm: Burlington Sports & Spine Clinic
• 7:00-8:00pm: bed/bath/book routines

For a time, I didn’t do school pickup on Mondays.  I worked straight through, 11am-7pm, and would come home just in time to tuck in my young children.  With only a short time together before they went to school in the morning, I felt like I was missing out on way too much of their day; my heart always felt heavy on Monday nights.  Soon into that school year, after a few tears and a lot of soul-searching, my husband suggested that I modify my hours slightly to accommodate more family time.  Namely, making the school pickup and 10-minute walk home a part of my day.  Brilliant.  Such a simple solution, and yet it was a modification I couldn’t see when looking from the inside out.  It was the forest and the trees and all of the other cliche wisdom.

So I began blocking off an hour in the middle of my Monday (and was once again oh-so-thankful for the logistics of our neighbourhood), so that I could pick up my kids from school and walk them home before heading back for an afternoon at the clinic.  Our walks to and from school are without a doubt my most favourite parts of the day.  In those ten minutes, I rarely get a word in edgewise; they spill their guts, share their dreams, tell their stories.  We walk, we laugh, we talk, interrupted and carefree.  And this has completely changed my Monday, and therefore, my whole week.

A one-hour change.

That’s all it took.

Sometimes the simplest changes produce the biggest results.