Sleep

“A well-spent day brings happy sleep.”

Leonardo da Vinci

I don’t have much to say tonight.  Perhaps I should just go to sleep. .  But I’d like to get one more blog done while I’m still feeling that sense of urgency.  In addition to my sense of urgency, I’m feeling a little panic because my Internet is having problems again, which means, I’ll be the only one reading this.

Now I’m frustrated and tired, but I’m going to keep writing and try to stay calm.  I’m definitely not working with any sense of urgency, so I’m going to stay focused now and get this done.  I probably should have taken that nap.

The party I went to was good.  I had good conversation, good food and a lot of laughs.  I like the people I work with and I like my boss.  I feel very fortunate to have the job I have.  I feel fortunate for a lot of reasons.  Last week at this time I was sick and miserable.  Tonight I feel great.

But I’m tired.  It’s hard to write when I’m tired.  Things don’t come out the way I want, if they come out at all.  I just sit here being indecisive and irritable.  I know that I don’t’ get enough sleep as it is.  This has been a problem my whole life.   When I was a child, up until I was 15 or 16, it usually took me an hour or two to fall asleep. 

The worst thing that ever happened to me regarding sleep was when I went about three weeks without being able to sleep consistently.  After several days of falling asleep and then waking up two hours later, due to itching, I thought I was going to lose my mind.  At the time I had just moved into a new place, at no small effort.  I was living with an elderly woman named Hattie.  I was exhausted from no sleep and overwork. 

Then one Saturday, after three weeks of almost no sleep, I stumbled into the kitchen and Hattie told me she wanted me to move out because I had forgotten to take the lint out of the lint screen.  I started wailing, literally, because of my exhaustion and because the thought of moving again after only a month made me distraught.  She relented after seeing me break down, but I couldn’t stop crying.  Hattie told me to go see a doctor.  I did, immediately.  It turned out that I had scabies.  I got some shots and soon I was back to regular sleep.

That was a pretty traumatic event though.  A couple of years later I was watching an episode of Family Ties, in which Michael J. Fox’s character hadn’t slept for days.  Although this show was a comedy, this more serious episode horrified because it brought back all the memories of not sleeping.

Worse than losing sleep have been the times I have slept through life, the times I did less than my best, and the times I repeated and perpetuated useless or harmful patterns.  Now I’m much more awake and much more present.  But at the moment, I’m also very tired. 

It’s time to Get Started and Keep Going…or it will be when I wake up in the morning.