Sleep
Here I am awake at 1:10 a.m., after going to bed at 10:30. I woke up shivering, instinctively pulling the covers over me before my body pushed back — wait, I’m not cold. Then why did you shiver? I took the covers off again, trying to listen to the signals without over-interpreting them. A moment later my right pinky toe began to sting, the familiar neuropathy flaring like a small warning light. It made me wonder, as I often do in moments like this: who is in charge of sleep, the mind or the body? And the answer, of course, is both. Both are equal, both are stubborn, both have their own logic.
I thought of all the things I had done before bed, all the rituals meant to coax my system toward rest. I didn’t take my walk, but I did play the piano. I stretched with some yoga. I drank my sleep tea and took the things that usually help — two aspirin, two magnesium glycinate, one trazodone. My reward was two hours of sleep before my body (or my mind or both?) decided to have other plans.
Lying there awake, I rehearsed the advice I’ve read over the years about what to do when sleep won’t come. Eat a little dark chocolate. Done. Get out of bed and do something quiet until you’re tired again. So here I am, writing. But then I remembered the warnings about blue light and circadian rhythms, and for a moment I felt caught between instructions — do this, don’t do that — none of it matching the reality of my body at 1:10 a.m.
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My head still aches a little, though the peppermint oil helps. My toe still stings. My mind is awake, my body is restless, and neither one seems interested in cooperating with the other. But there is something strangely grounding about being awake like this, noticing each sensation without catastrophizing it, letting the night be what it is instead of what I wish it were.
Maybe this is the real work of these hours: learning to sit with the body’s unpredictability, the mind’s insistence, the quiet negotiations between the two. Learning that wakefulness is not failure. Learning that being human sometimes means being awake when you’d rather be asleep, listening to the small, stubborn signals of a body that is doing its best, even when it feels like it isn’t.
And maybe, in its own way, this too is a kind of rest.
a wise yogi said that 20 minutes in child’s pose is the same as 8 hours sleep. I will rest in child’s pose, then go back to bed. see you in the morning, because i have learned one thing — morning will come.
OMG! I slept til 6:30!
