Life After Monday - Paperback

by Stephen A. Bort (Author), Travis L. Walthall (Illustrator)

Monday morning. The mania sets in at precisely 6 a.m. when your alarm clock screams out -- the racing thoughts, irritability, rapid speech. Your mind assumes the familiar bipolarity as it's quickly occupied by two opposite and contradictory extremes -- what you will be doing today until five o'clock versus what you need to be doing in the coming eight-hour day.

Maslow deduced in 1943 that this "discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for." He was referring then to what the songwriter Prince more recently coined as Manic Monday in a song of his recorded by The Bangles in 1985. Prince understood just where the respected psychiatrist was coming from when Maslow further noted that a "musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be."

The Greek aristocrat and poet Pindar in his Odes had preserved this truth long ago as -- "Learn, and become such as you are." Some uncredited and unknown wise guy later coined the more familiar -- "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken." The excruciating mental pain of being trapped doing work not suited to your psyche, trapped in some perverse game of longing to escape while not having enough time left in a week or a day to manage that, has actually become a seasoned archetype.

-- "I can't be late, 'cause then I guess I just won't get paid." Prince, Manic Monday.

With this book, the first of its kind, certainly the most thorough and definitive presentation of anything resembling the idea, the author paints a bright bullseye on that archetype and pulls back the bow. Letting the arrow fly, he reveals an alternative consciousness, alternative to the royal one* within which we all have to reside and work in to exist, perhaps to prosper. We must learn and practice the one within the other as first steps toward a sane society.

*Water Brueggermann. The Prophetic Imagination.