Why Does Tuesday Feel Boring Now?

Maybe this is a new, boring kind of okay.

Oct 29, 2026

A five-minute scramble at 6:05 on a Tuesday can ruin an entire evening. Or it can pass by in the most boring way possible.

You leave work at 4:45 and get in the pickup line with every other exhausted parent who also raced to the school. By the time you get home and homework is started (after a short argument, of course), you’re staring into the fridge trying to figure out dinner, because you resorted to eating out the previous two nights. And karate starts at 6:30, so time is running short, and somebody has to get everyone fed and out the door. Wouldn’t you know, that job falls to you.

At 6:05, you send them to get dressed. One kid can’t find their pants and the other can’t find their gi top, and now everyone’s standing in the hallway staring at each other. This is where it could go left or right.

This Tuesday, in one form or another, is happening in households everywhere. Which way the evening goes depends mostly on what terrain they’re standing in: the Ashes, the Ember, the Flame, or the Rise.

Not sure what these terrains mean? The Primer will catch you up.

Tuesday One

You yell. “Why can’t anyone in this house keep track of anything? You’re so forgetful. You’d better find it. We have three minutes to get out the door!”

And while your voice is yelling, your inner voice starts the shame spiral. The kids are forgetful, sure. But when exactly was the last time you put either of those things in the washer? A better mom would know exactly where her kids’ things were.

Nobody talks in the car, and by the time you’ve pulled into the parking lot, you’ve officially decided you’re the worst mom there, the one who screams about pants. You promise yourself tomorrow will be different. But you know you’re lying, because that promise just goes right on top of the giant pile of to-dos you’ve already promised yourself.

When you’re over capacity, your body is still running the threat database, built from years of collecting data points one bad night at a time. Each of those data points reinforces the idea that when things go wrong, nobody’s coming to fix them, so it’s up to you. Every missing sock and every “Mom?” gets checked against those data points before you’ve had a chance to think.

Your body is one large prediction machine, filled with two databases: your threat database and your safety database. (I go through this a lot more in depth here.) Every event in your life, real or perceived, gets logged as either a threat, if something negative happened, or safe, if something positive or nothing at all happened. So when most of your evidence says a small problem at 6:05 becomes a big problem by 6:30, it’s going to sound the alarm early and fast.

For me, back then, I was the emotional regulator in the house and always felt the need to play buffer between my kids and my now ex-husband. So when something went wrong, my alarm screamed, “Handle this fast before he gets upset.”

But you only have so much capacity in your body each day. And when that capacity has already been filled with issues at work, needing to get gas, and being almost late to the school, along with everything else you’re still carrying from your past and your present, there’s just no more room for a missing gi.

Tuesday Two

“Mom, I can’t find my pants.”
“Seriously? Okay. Let’s go look.”

You walk each kid to their room and suggest a couple of places to check, because you know that after doing laundry on Sunday, you made sure everything got put away where it needed to go. And lo and behold, the pants are exactly where they belong, which every parent knows is the single best hiding place in the house. (They will never look there. Ever.)

So everyone gets dressed and in the car by 6:20. The kids go back and forth picking the music, and you all sing, badly, the whole way to karate.

What changed?

The kids didn’t magically get more organized overnight, although that is a dream I dream most every night.

But when you’re in the Rise, you’ve learned to expand your capacity while also taking out old rules and old patterns and rewriting them to fit your life. In doing that, you’ve been filling your safety database piece by piece. Every time your body braces for the old ending and it doesn’t come, that’s a new entry in the safety database.

So since you still have capacity, the missing pants are just another drop in the bucket to be solved. When you have extra room inside your capacity, your voice outruns the Machine. Your voice catches the shame spiral before it starts, and you’re able to separate the event that’s happening from the person you are.

Why the Rise is so easy to miss

The Rise feels like a Tuesday that just became Wednesday.

After living through the Flame, where everything you’d been holding together was burning down around you, normal can feel strange. When I met Scott, I almost walked away because there were no fireworks. No explosions, no chaos. It was fun in a boring sort of way. It reminds me of the Big Bang Theory episode where Penny is talking about her relationship with Leonard and says maybe this is a new, boring kind of love. That’s exactly what the Rise feels like.

All of a sudden you realize you’ve been living in it, and you’ve had four or five of these ordinary Tuesdays that you didn’t notice because nothing happened. (That’s kind of the whole point.)

While you’re in the Rise, your safety database keeps filling up. That doesn’t mean the threat database won’t ever fire. I mean, life still lives. But as long as you keep filling that safety database more often than not, and your capacity holds, you stay in the Rise.

And don’t forget the laws of the Spiral. You will find yourself in the Ashes again. But everything you learned through the first spiral and everything you logged during your time in the Rise helps you rise faster this time.

So don’t be scared of the boring. Sometimes the boring is exactly what you’ve been looking for all along.

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