It is a gift that I have never needed much sleep. The thing of it lately and the last couple of nights in particular is that I really do appreciate those four to five hours and I haven’t even been getting those. I might have gotten an hour total last night and maybe two the night before so it’s been a challenge to get going. My mantra has always been that “there are twenty-four usable hours in every day.” My cure is the same as the one I use when I travel to avoid jet lag, which is to simply keep going. I go for a run often in the morning anyway, but when I have had no sleep I always run and most of the time it keeps me from crashing.
I was thinking this morning as I ran (my best thinking time is often while running or walking so many of my blogs come after a good long run) about how using more hours really is freeing. It’s not just that you can get more done, and I am certainly not advocating everyone replace sleep with a morning run, but it’s like you take control of time instead of letting it take control of you. Often it’s easy to feel like there is just too much to do, and maybe there is, so there is a lot to be said for giving ourselves permission not to do things, but when you don’t see time as so confining things can feel a little less overwhelming. We fit our lives into a schedule, whether it’s for school or for work or whatever else we do our calendars are so full we need electronic devises to keep track of what we ourselves are doing. Maybe it would be nice if everyone required less sleep, but really it comes down to attitude and priority. If you want to make time to do something you figure it out. If there are multiple “important” things you may have to decide or you may have to shuffle and sacrifice something else (like sleep), but you are in control even if you don’t feel like you are. Maybe it’s easy to say coming from someone who doesn’t sleep much and who has a job where I set my own hours, but I have plenty of demands on my time and I choose to make work what I feel like I need to make work. I can give a night to my teething one year old and not begrudge her partly because I don’t need as much sleep, but also because I decided that she needed me more than I needed sleep. Plenty of parent’s might have closed doors and let her cry and that may not do her any real harm and I know great parent’s who choose that method, but chose to comfort her because that was my greater priority and I own that. I suppose ultimately that is my point; we have to own our own time. We make choices and we live them. I am all for finding ways to give control away and simply let things happen, but you can’t do that either if you don’t take control of your time and give yourself the freedom to choose.
Tripping the Light Fantastic 