The Commitment to a Year of Alternate Sundays
The 'Year of Lost Sundays' is one of the Institute's most demanding long-form projects. Participants commit to spending every Sunday for a full year engaged in a single, evolving experimental tourism practice within their city of residence. The practice is self-designed but must follow an Institute-approved framework emphasizing repetition, minute observation, and gradual, rule-based evolution. We interviewed Mara, a graphic designer who completed the project, to understand its long-term effects. 'The first month was the hardest,' she admits. 'The temptation to just have a normal lazy Sunday, to meet friends for brunch, was overwhelming. I felt like I was giving up my day of rest. But that was the point—to redefine what 'rest' and 'engagement' could mean.'
The Practice: Mapping the Growth of a Single Tree
Mara's chosen practice was to visit the same, modest maple tree in a neighborhood park every Sunday. Her initial rule was simple: spend one hour with the tree, documenting it in a single medium each week. Week one was pencil sketches. Week two was black-and-white photography. Week three was sound recordings of the leaves and the environment around it. Week four was collecting fallen items from its base. 'By the third month,' she says, 'the rules started to evolve on their own. I began to notice not just the tree, but its relationship to everything else. The angle of sunlight through its branches at 10 AM each week, the pattern of bird visitors, the way people interacted with it—a man who always sat on the same bench facing away from it, children who tried to climb it.' Her documentation became less about the tree as an object and more about the tree as a nexus of ecological and social connections.
Psychological Shifts and the Depth of Familiarity
The psychological shift was profound. 'Around month six, I stopped being a visitor to the tree. I felt like a custodian, a witness. I noticed when a branch was damaged after a storm, when the first leaf turned color. The tree became a calendar, a barometer for the year. My own life events—a job loss, a new relationship—became intertwined with its stages. I found myself talking to it, not in a crazy way, but in a way you'd talk to a diary.' This deep, slow familiarity is the antithesis of tourist 'sightseeing.' It cultivated what Mara calls 'vertical attention'—going deeper into one spot rather than scanning broadly across many. The tree, once just part of the scenery, became the most vivid, complex character in her life that year.
The Ripple Effects on Perception and Creativity
The project had ripple effects far beyond Sundays. 'It changed how I see everything,' Mara states. 'I started noticing the specific details of other trees, of lampposts, of cracks in the sidewalk. My design work became more textured, more attentive to context and slow change. I became allergic to superficiality.' The discipline of the weekly ritual also provided an unexpected structural backbone to her year, a constant amidst other variables. When the year ended, she experienced a real sense of grief. 'The final Sunday felt like saying goodbye to a dear friend who was moving away. I still visit, but it's not the same without the imperative.' She compiled her year's work into an artist's book, a thick volume that tells the story of a place through one stationary life form.
Mara's experience underscores a core Institute belief: that transformative travel doesn't require mileage. It requires commitment and constraint. The 'Year of Lost Sundays' is an exercise in radical depth, proving that the greatest mysteries and adventures are often hidden in plain sight, awaiting the dedicated, repetitive gaze. It turns tourism inward, making the traveler a permanent, attentive resident of a tiny, chosen world. For Mara, and many others, the project didn't just provide a year of activities; it permanently altered the resolution at which they perceive reality, gifting them with a patient, layered vision that finds infinity in a single leaf.