The Last Sunday
A year ago today, I woke up early to catch a company car to the factory in Taipei to continue a mechanical design review for a new product. Business trips for an engineer in Asia are tedious affairs, featuring weeks of time alternating between small sterile meeting rooms and busy factory floors acting as arbiters between local engineers and colleagues back home, often with no return date set until the parts are approved. I've been on nearly 25 such trips, but this one was special.
Notably, I had a rare completely open weekend and was able to enjoy the city alone and uninterrupted by work thoughts. With all the time I've spent in China, you'd think I would have explored more, but between the factory visits all day and the Skype calls all night, there's not much time for yourself. But this weekend was truly free, and I took the opportunity to explore a bit.
At the tomb of Chiang Kai-shek, they were having a Halloween festival much like you'd expect to see in the US. Kids were dressed up playing carnival games while parents talked and took pictures, and the image of the hard working foreigner quietly observing family life far away from his own wasn't lost on me. But I took advantage of the moment and did something I had not done in years – I opened my sketchbook and just drew. Fear of having lost my touch hurt the mood for a while, but eventually I lost myself in the flow and it felt great. The sketch itself was pretty pedestrian, but the moment was profound. I rediscovered an old passion that day.
As it turns out that was my last Sunday in Asia, drawing the foreign travel phase of my working career to a close for the foreseeable future. The peace of sketching on the steps of the National Theater was a nice memory of my Eastern work adventures.
Yesterday featured the long familiar routine of church, groceries, football, and a nice home cooked meal, followed by the customary realization that work starts up again the next morning and the racing mental task list as I try to get to sleep. But rather than being sucked into the mindset and feeling disappointed, I felt a sense of detachment as I studied the moment for one last time. It was my last Sunday before a workday.
I honestly don’t think that reality has sunk in quite yet, and this Last Sunday featured no great moment of epiphany. But something about the recognition of the routine feels most appropriate right now, and I imagine it will make a lot more sense once that routine is broken in future weeks.
I can’t say I’ve created many more sketches since that day one year ago in Taipei, but dedicating time to art is on my short list of things I look forward to. Turning a new leaf, there are a lot of new First Sundays on my horizon.