TUPAVIEW: THE WEEKEND
“I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”
— Rabindranath Tago
By Mike Tupa
Aug. 27, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT
There’s one favorite concept that gladdens the heart of almost every human being.
It’s known as The Weekend.
If only we can make it to The Weekend, everything will be all right.
It helps us plow through the Monday Blahs, gives us strength to reach Hump Day, pulls like a magnet through Long Thursday and deposits us at Friday.
Finally we’re on the doorstep of Saturday — and fun. It’s The Weekend. Our time is our own. We might work harder on Saturday than any other day of the week.
But it doesn’t feel like work because we’re in control. We’re doing what we want to do — or at least what we need to do (Honey Do), which is still rewarding because an unwanted task completed is like throwing off a burden.
It kind of reminds me of when we were kids on a long car trip with our mom or dad at the steering wheel.
“Mom, are we there yet?”
“Daddy, how long until we get there?”
It seems like life is divided into a perpetual pattern between gritting our teeth and grinding with zombie-like endurance through the mix of the mundane and stressful because we know The Weekend is coming or our destination is only a matter of miles and hours away.
It’s Tuesday. The Weekend seems forever away. It’s Wednesday, we’re already worn out and it’s just halfway.
It seems like we’re always waiting for The Weekend — and when it arrives it’s never enough.
There are other kinds of “weekends” in life — when we’re old enough to go junior high, when we’re old enough to obtain our driver’s license, when we’re old enough to shave or to use real make-up for the first time, when we’re old enough to go our first date, when we’re old enough to start high school, when we’re old enough to escape the “prison” of high school and graduate, when we graduate from college, when we land our first real job, when we find that special someone, when we welcome the birth of our first child.
Waiting — always waiting for something better — for something we think will make our life complete and happy.
Yet, as we reach each of the stages mentioned above, and many others, we find there is no final destination to happiness, at least not on this earth. We discover new challenges, new worries, new pain, new stress, new heartbreaks, new regrets.
In fact, we often look back at a past stage of our life with longing nostalgia. We wish we could be back in the simple days of our high school years when our parents paid the bills, when we had a comfortable bed, when we didn’t have to worry about buying groceries or washing all the dishes and the other tasks of being on our own. We forget how anxiously back in those high school days how much we wanted to break free of rules and restrictions — only to learn later those rules and restrictions were actually walls shielding us from the cruel and cold world of adulthood.
So it goes. Life goes on.
Before long we add a new word to The Weekend — The Elusive Weekend.
We never seem to arrive to that perfect time of carefree days and the flight of all worries. Health will deprive us of some of the enjoyment we think we ought to have as we go past our prime and middle age.
Life just seems to be an endless climb from one challenging plateau to the next one.
Here’s a couple of ideas that might help you and me find more contentment in the ever-changing tide.
We need to learn to enjoy the scenery along the way.
I recall being 13 years old and going on a group fishing trip with my great-uncles and second-cousins. We car-pooled in a caravan for 200 or more miles. But to keep from getting bored out of our skulls, we played little mind games such as seeing how many license plates from different states we spotted or trying to count the cows spread out on the farms near the highway.
We need to stop being fixated on arriving. We need to find joy in the journey itself, whether we’re literally traveling or dealing with the experiences of our circumstances.
I’ve talked before about how my mom, sister and I went through some very rugged financial years when I was a teenager. But my mom always tried to set aside $5 — which was a huge amount for us in the late 1960s — to splurge on fast food every Saturday night.
She didn’t want us to think of ourselves as totally deprived. Even though we could have easily used that $5 for bread and eggs and milk, and so on, she thought it was important now and then to treat oneself to the tasty things of life — kind of like the Mary Poppins’ “Spoonful of Sugar” philosophy.
Even in those days of our hardship, mom helped us find enjoyment in the simple pleasures of life — playing our record albums, walking to the library once a week to return and check out books, buying a real Christmas tree and toting it home (we didn’t have a car), going to matinee movies (the three of us once walked 40 blocks one way to see the film “Oliver!”), and intelligent discussions about many, many subjects.
Those things didn’t ease our financial circumstances — there were times when mom couldn’t pay the gas bill and other times when we only had popcorn to eat for a few days until her payday as a cleaning lady — but we never felt “poor” in the literal sense. Her attitude was “just going through some tough times,” and that things would get better.
Learn to make the most of the journey, to look for the beauty in the scenery, to enjoy the little comforts within your means to make the miles pass more enjoyably.
Another way to focus on the journey is to try to make other peoples’ journey more meaningful. Be kind. Reach out when someone stumbles and help them get upright again. Accept other people’s well-meaning help when appropriately offered. Or even give other people a chance to help you just as you attempt to help someone else.
Even though we’re all on solo journeys — so to speak — we’re still fellow travelers on the same or similar paths.
Never let a day go by without finding something to enjoy or without connecting with someone else, even if as simple as a smile, a handshake or a wave of the hand. Call a relative or a friend, write a letter or an email, put in a journal entry that might be important to someone else someday.
Read from a good book. Doing good could be as simple (and as profound) as offering a prayer that God will bless you and bless someone else that day. There’s some kind of good everyone can do no matter how alone they might be.
And that will make the journey sweeter.
I appreciate so much the thought of Rabindranath Tago that I used to open this column.
A lot of us want to postpone singing our song until we think the time is exactly right and the audience is perfect.
Unfortunately that magic moment rarely happens in life — and, as Tago wrote, our song remains unsung.
Let’s follow the example of the words crooned by Karen Carpenter and written by Joseph G. Raposo: “Sing, sing a song, make it simple to last your whole life long. Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear, just sing, sing a song.”
I think of my own life — from a broken home with mixed religion, moving 10 times before I turned 11 years old, enduring severe economic conditions, the worst-dressed kid in school, having to live with an uncle and aunt for three years because we didn’t have enough money, deathly shy with girls (I put my cracked ego on the line every time I asked one for a date) and too scared to write for the high school newspaper because I thought no one would ever want to read anything I wrote.
But thanks to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ my mom and sister and some other incredible people — and a song inside me that refused to be silenced no matter how much I felt beat down — I was able to string my instrument and at least say what I wanted to say, whether it has been of any significant worth or not.
It can be the same with you. You have a song to sing in your unique way. It might be through your gift of raising wonderful children or talents that bless the community or the ability to elevate other people’s spirituality or to make people around you feel happier and more important, or a hundred other manifestations of the same thing.
Our destination of fulfillment on this globe isn’t a place or a future time — the spirit of our journey, not the arrival, is the real achievement.
I’ve always hated good-byes to loved ones when we were about to be separated for some reason or other by hundreds of miles. But isn’t it nice to care so much about something or somebody that it twists your heart to be away from them? That’s the true test of the quality of the journey — when it becomes about loving others and not just the pursuit of toys.
One last example, I recall that when I worked for a newspaper in Ely, Nev., I drove home five or six times a year to visit my mom and sister in Salt Lake City — a one-way trip of about 250 miles.
The first 120 miles was on a barren stretch of highway with no towns and high desert terrain on both sides stretching for what seemed a million miles to the base of mountainous growth. The road did go through some rock outcroppings that had been blasted through to create the road but otherwise was just a blue of tumbleweed, cactus, scrub weeds, soil, humped over tree clusters and occasional wildlife.
This experience took place in 1988-90 and was a nerve-wracking drive for me in my worn-out (junky) 1969 Cadillac. I worried constantly about breaking down 50 or 60 miles from help. This was in the days before cell phones and I didn’t possess a CB.
The worst part was returning from Salt Lake City to Ely because I usually left late on a Sunday afternoon that it was pitch black prior to my reaching Wendover. With absolutely no highway lighting whatsoever — and the constant anxiety of breaking down or deer or cattle or other critters in the roadway — those 120 miles seemed to extend forever. The journey passed a little nicer thanks to my music tapes and soda and snack food within reach — but the underlying anxiety remained.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t even see the stars. The only light outside my car were my headlight beams slicing through the wall of darkness.
About 10 miles north of Ely was a huge smokestack that had been part of a copper smelter operation before it closed down in the early 1980s. But due to the Ely Municipal Airport, lights had been installed on the top of the smokestack to prevent planes crashing into it.
Between 25 to 30 miles north of Ely I began to see the faint glow of the smokestack beacons like flickering white blisters in the distant night. As soon as I picked up the first sight of the lights, I relaxed because I knew home was not far away — and I knew if I broke down I’d only be 15 miles, or so, from help.
Reliable milestones can help navigate us through life’s journey toward The Elusive Weekend.
"So close the distance
between a dream and pure chance,
a blind spot in the eye of fate,
a stumble down destiny's strait.
“But, having reached partial height
in the gleam — between dirt and flight —
winds of worth soften the fall
to those who offered their all.”
By Michael Jerry Tupa
