Good morning, everyone! Welcome to the first “Motivation Monday!”

I hope that your weekends went swimmingly and that you made the most of it! Here in Brooklyn, we had some beautiful weather to welcome us to the fall season. On Sunday, my boyfriend and I made the most of it by attending the Atlantic Antic street festival after Sunday Mass. It was sheer heaven. Crowded, but sheer heaven.

If you’re anything like me, then you look forward to Mondays as though you were going to get a tooth pulled at the dentist’s office. When Mondays rolled around…I usually did anything to not get out of bed in the morning. I would press the snooze button 50 times, burrow deeper in bed, call out “Is it Sunday?” only to hear that resounding “No,” and then I begrudgingly left my bed as though I was a slowly-awakening zombie in a 1950s B-List horror flick.

Now, as much as I abhor the routine of the Monday grind, I am a very optimistic person by nature. So, even though hating Mondays is a societal rite of passage for the majority of working Millennials in Western culture, I’ve come to realize that I never seem to accomplish much on a Monday when I wake up with a negative mindset. However, when I approach Monday with a more positive frame of mind, I am much more productive for my entire week.

In his book The Way, St. Josemaria Escriva writes:

“Work. It’s there. The instruments can’t be left to grow rusty.  There are also “norms” to avoid the mildew and the rust. Just put them into practice.” [Escriva, 486]

This phrase really made me re-orient the way that I view my Mondays.  I started thinking of Monday as a muscle. Yes, like a body muscle that you exercise at the gym to the point of fatigue. What I mean by that is I started to think of my Mondays as opportunities to exercise my positive approach to beginnings. The more I choose to start my Mondays with a positive mental attitude, the more productive I became as a person, and the happier I was throughout the week.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t easy, and there are some Mondays where I’m

still bemoaning the existence of Monday. However, like a bicep extension, you keep working at it. You start off with something small, and you work your way up. So for me, the way that I started off was by not complaining on Monday morning when I got up. In fact, I didn’t say anything much. I just got up and went to start my day.

Next, I began to thank God for allowing me to wake up to see another morning. Offering gratitude to God is huge because I acknowledge the privilege that I received and accepted, which was waking up after a night’s sleep. This is important to me because waking up to see the morning sun is not a privilege that everyone gets, and I’m not one to go without offering gratitude. If you don’t believe in God, then offer your gratitude to whomever and whatever you believe.

The final step for exercising my Monday muscle is setting an intention for the day. For today, my intention is simple: “Love More.” I’ve set this intention because in this increasingly political era, hatred is streaming forth on every media platform, every subway platform, every political platform, and the like. I’m tired of seeing this hatred, and I don’t want to engage in it any longer. I’d rather be a part of the solution than the problem, so I am actively choosing to love more. It won’t be easy in every instance, but love is a decisive action that you don’t back from. So, I offer my love to the world by choosing to treat people with respect and kindness…which is not always easy in the era of social media arguments and this girl’s penchant for getting into them. But…….progress.

I hope that I’ve offered you something to think about on this Monday! Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below!

Love,

Andrea

Works Cited- Escriva, Josemaria. The Way. New Rochelle, NY , Scepter Publishers, 1982. Tract 486