The goal of Sunday is to leave my home as little as possible.

In the hush of the seventh day, the choreographer Mark Morris speaks a rule as plain as bread: “The goal of Sunday is to leave my home as little as possible.” Do not mistake its simplicity. It is a commandment of recovery, a covenant with stillness. After six days of motion—rehearsals, tours, bright rooms full of counting and sweat—the artist claims a sanctuary. He names home not as an address but as a vessel: four walls where the body unlearns urgency and the mind returns to one breath at a time.

In the tongue of our elders, this is the old wisdom of Sabbath. The week is a wheel that spins; Sunday is the axle, fixed and quiet, on which the whole turns. To leave my home as little as possible is not laziness; it is liturgy. The dance master knows that the muscle grows in the pause, and the step finds truth in the silence after music. The sentence is thus both personal and universal: an artist’s rite that doubles as a human rhythm—labor crowned by rest, outwardness braided to inwardness, motion redeemed by stillness.

The origin of such a saying lives in the biography of craft. Morris’s days are measured in counts and cues, lights and travel—airports at dawn, theaters at dusk, the social blaze that follows the curtain. Home becomes the only room where he is not watched or timed. By limiting departure on Sunday, he bends time back toward wholeness. Here he can cook slowly, read slowly, mend what haste has thinned. The body that must leap tomorrow sits; the mind that must remember choreography forgets—to remember itself.

A story will make this plain. There was a company dancer—call her Livia—whose feet were her livelihood and her prayer. For months she chased excellence six days a week; on the seventh she ran errands, met every invitation, and returned to Monday in fragments. Then a mentor taught her the Morris rule. She folded the day inward: phone off till noon, a walk circling the same park, soup on the stove, notes in a quiet hand. By evening her breath had lengthened; by Monday her turns steadied. Nothing mystical—only the arithmetic of rest observed. The audience saw grace. They did not see Sunday keeping vigil.

History keeps an older mirror. The monks who copied books by daylight kept one day for psalms and repair; the farmers who harrowed fields left one furrow uncut, a sign that the world is not owned but received. Even kings learned—some too late—that kingdoms ruled without pauses become tyrannies of speed. The ancients knew what we forget: a house that never closes its door to the street will soon be a marketplace, not a dwelling. To leave my home as little as possible is to defend the hearth from the empire of errands.

From this, a lesson worthy of our children: guard a day where you are unproven and unproductive, and you will do your work more humanly the other six. Make Sunday your treaty with yourself. Let meals take the time they take; sit where the light is kind; speak softly or not at all. The soul does not grow by acceleration; it grows by attention. The week will try to conscript this day; answer it with a closed gate and an open window.

Practical rites for a kept Sunday: the night before, prepare the house (clear a table, set a book aside, lay out tea); upon waking, choose one anchoring ritual (a stretch, a psalm, a page) and let it pace the hours; restrict departures to what is merciful rather than habitual; replace scrolling with strolling; cook something simple that smells like patience; in the late afternoon, name three gifts of the day and one small intention for tomorrow. Do this, and the sentence of Mark Morris will cease to be a preference and become a practice—one that steadies the pulse, deepens the work, and teaches your life to dance again when the music returns.