On sleep

An old school friend of mine posted online that he needs to sleep more.  When I say old school friend, I don’t mean that we’re by any means old, but my immediate thought of ‘mmmm… sleep’ made me think about just how old we are.

I was reading about sleep just recently because I find myself these days in a permanent state of needing a nap.  When I have that nap, no matter what alarms I might set to make sure it is just a nap, I wake up several hours later uttering either a torrent of expletives or a disbelieving groan that I’ve done it again.

So am I, are we, getting old?  Well yes and no.  I’m resigned enough to admit I’m getting too old to burn the candle at both ends more than once a twice a week.  I simply don’t have the energy I had even five years ago.  But I and my friends are not old.  We’re just older.  It’s that age that’s past the vast resources of energy but with still enough to somehow shoehorn into our time that an early night is a once in a blue moon thing.  It’s not yet the age where we need less sleep than we did.  That will come at the time when we have less to do with our day.  The result is feeling much aggrieved that enough sleep is a tricky thing to accomplish.

It seems like a design flaw to me that needing less sleep comes to us as we grow old and are past our prime.  Our most productive years are long gone before we can get by on a few short hours a night and forty winks in the afternoon.  Why design us that way?  I suppose it comes down to the restorative nature of sleep.  The older we get, the less demand there is for restoration.

So yes, I was reading about sleep and trying to work out how to get mine back on track.  It turns out that our natural sleep pattern is in our DNA.  We’re either owls, or larks.  I’m an owl.  Loosely translated, that means if you want a reasonable response from me leave it till after 11am.  Owls have the most flexible pattern.  It’s easy for us to stay up all night.  Ask a morning person, a lark, to do that and you’ll soon see the bags under the eyes.  Ask an owl and we’ll manage to get through a full 24 hours with relative ease.

Finally I understood why this distraction and that involvement, in my case usually one or more creative projects at once, so quickly lead me into a nocturnal lifestyle.  Because my owlish DNA lets me disregard bedtime and disrespect the alarm clock, it’s not a massive leap to completely reverse polarity and not see the light of day for weeks at a time.  The problem is that sooner or later I need 7.5 to 9 hours of sleep just like everyone else and by that point I’m in deficit so I still wake up tired.

The experts say to get on track, choose a set bedtime then sleep until you wake naturally.  After a few days of waking earlier and earlier, you should be back on track with a consistent pattern.  So far I’m anywhere from 9 to 11 hours.  That’s a big chunk gone from 24.  When I get back to full time work, to be sure I wake up in time, I’ll be getting home from the office, eating and going to bed.  To be up for 6.30 if I settle to 11 hour sleep patterns, it will be bed by 7.30 and sometimes, when traffic is heavy, I don’t get home until 6.30.  Where does my life fit in to all that?  When do I run the house, see my friends, wash my hair?!

The experts, it would seem, recommend discovering a natural sleep pattern that can in no way fit in with the every day life of someone my age.  Yet I feel a pang of loss at the thought that until I retire or win the lottery, whichever comes first, I can never have enough sleep.  No wonder manufacturers of eye creams and energy drinks are so smugly comfortable that their business is assured.  I bet they sleep just fine!

Writer's block

That frustrating feeling when what you want to write and what you can write bear no resemblance to one another.

I can write a blog.  I can write in my journal.  I can write a paragraph about how when I spilled the milk, it looked like the moon.  I can write responses to a friend’s critique and defend those aspects I feel are important to the passage I sent.  Can I pick up and carry on with the main body of the piece?  No.

I’ve had ideas and I know where they’ll fit into the story.  I’ve even picked up the laptop several times to set to work.  When I open the document though, I just stare at it and end up wandering off over the Internet or picking up a book to read instead.

This started while I was reading Atonement by Ian Mcewan, a book with which I was somewhat disillusioned.  It’s achieved great critical acclaim but I can’t think why.  It’s over written.  It’s all description, very little event.  Perhaps my subconscious thinks why bother when something that really isn’t that great is received with such applause.  Surely what it should be thinking is if that can be lauded and awarded, then there’s no reason mine can’t be too.

There was also the problem of cover art and how I’m going to find something that suits both the style and the content without infringing anyone’s copyright or having to pay a large fee.  The answer of course is to create it myself, but how and what, and when and where?  Have I stopped writing because finishing will bring me up against that question?  Why don’t I sort it out now then when I do finish, it’s all ready to put together?

I’ve been pretty much nocturnal for a while too.  Maybe I can’t write because I’m just too tired and unfocussed.

Of course, there’s no deadline and nothing depending on the completion.  It’s only a whim really.  Perhaps if I set myself a deadline I might get going.  But then if I set the deadline, I can extend or waive it on a whim just like I set out writing.  Maybe I should ask someone else to set a date for completion.  Someone of whom I’m obliged to take notice.  Yet I know what I’m like and I’ll procrastinate then dash something out with no time to spare and I’ll not be happy with the results.

There’s also the possibility that I’ve dreamed I already wrote it so to my subconscious it’s done and dusted.  It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.  When your dreams are so real you can’t tell the difference, you have to wonder whether it is writer’s block after all.

All the wrong things

As good a place to start a blog as any, I suppose - saying the wrong thing - it has to be something that bloggers do all the time, right?  I mean, it's something that most people do at least once in their life.  Some of us do it as a matter of course and then spend days stressing about it.  Should we apologise, or does that just dig a deeper hole in which to bury what's left of our social and professional lives?  Should we leave it alone and maybe just seem ignorant?  Should we wait and see if the person or persons we realise we offended act differently toward us?  Will it fade away or will it fester?

These are questions that plague those of us with the unerring ability to say all the wrong things.  It's not even a case of putting one's foot in it.  It's simply a knack for saying the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate time.  It's not as easy as saying "I've been dying to tell you how sorry I am", because you can guarantee the moment you choose to say it is at the funeral of that person's beloved relative.  It's a real malfunction of the brain.  As some would call it, a brain fart.  Some brains are afflicted with constant flatulence.

It takes real talent to consistently say the wrong thing.  It needs a real sense of what shouldn't be said together with the genius of great ideas and eager opinions.  Then you need a huge amount of sensitivity and here's the paradox.  You have to be so sensitive to what the other person thinks that you cease to verbalise correctly, blurting out what comes to mind, however it comes to mind, regardless of form, inevitably sounding like an insensitive, insensible fool.  What we meant to say, when we try to slow down and restructure our bletherings, falls on deaf ears.  The other person has shut down their auditory function for the time being while they process their incredulity.

It's a painful state of affairs.  If we were really as insensitive as we now seem, we wouldn't have made the blunder in the first place.  If we weren't so enthusiastic and eager to tell someone that something of the utmost importance, we wouldn't have been so forthright in causing offence.  But it's too late and there is no rewind button for life.

So why do we always repeat the same pattern?  Well, to an extent it's our own unconscious fault.  It's not something we're aware of at the time, but we're only too conscious of it after the fact.  Thought processes follow patterns, and those patterns are always the same unless we change them.  We can do it, but it takes time and effort.  When we have those bright ideas, we need to stop, think, rehearse the presentation, plan alternative answers, calm down then, and only then, act.

But if I know all this, why blog about it as if it's just happened?  That would be because it has.  I was told the conference call would be Friday and I hadn't yet taken the deep breaths, formulated my thoughts and rehearsed every possible question and answer when it came in a day early.  In the course of things, I opened my mouth without knowing what was going to come out.  I've already apologised, but I sense a dark cloud over the future implications.  It seems there's still a way to go in retraining those thought patterns to stop digging a hole where there doesn't have to be one.  Nobody's perfect, but some of us have a dumbfounding ability for leading with the wrong foot, usually by putting it firmly in our mouths.