Sleeping-In
There are many reasons why I should be jealous of my youngest son, Thomas. He is young and just starting his life. He is engaged to be married to a lovely and brilliant young woman with whom he is currently living in Brooklyn. He and she met at Cornell University and have known each other literally from the first day of their arrival in their dormitory (their rooms were adjacent). They became best friends well before they ever dated, starting a few years later. He went to school before college in the West Village of Manhattan and she went to a public school in Fairfield County, Connecticut, but they have a shared metro New York upbringing. He tends towards the right brain creative activities and she tends towards the left brain analytical activities. He is in marketing and she is an engineer by training doing innovation consulting. All of that is wonderful and they seem to have a wonderful life ahead with one another, but that is not what makes me jealous. It is after 10am now on a Saturday morning and I have been awake for four hours, more or less. Thomas is visiting and is just now getting up which means that even if he stayed up late, he has been able to sleep for about ten hours. I got less than six hours including my middle-of-the-night wakefulness when I read all my inbox junk.
I find that I think a lot about getting enough sleep. I think most people would agree that the ability to get a good night’s sleep is one of the simplest but greatest pleasures. Under normal conditions I am a fairly light sleeper, but if I am tired enough I can sleep through a sonic boom. Lately, Betty and my aching sore body from doing my Hobbit House construction are the biggest culprits. Betty sleeps so much during the day that its no wonder she wants to get up at 6am. Her routine on waking is to shake her collar so that her dog tags jingle and then walk around rubbing her face agains the bed and snuffing every few seconds. There is no doubt that I get woken by the commotion, and if not, her jumping up on the bed and wandering up to sniff my head takes me out of whatever dream state I might have been in. There is absolutely no chance that these are merely her wake up routine as opposed to being a tactic to wake up Mom or Dad so that she can get on with her breakfast. As for my aching body, I can’t decide which is worse, my neck and shoulder aches from sleeping on my left side or my deltoid muscle aches from one too many handheld power tools that I’ve wielded during the work day. I suspect its a bit of both and my best evidence about power tool fatigue is that in the evenings after a hard-working day, I find my left hand going into a severe cramping spasm. It doesn’t hurt so much as get very weird when it gnarls up into a claw until I can unfold it and stretch it out.
Since my days of working a shift and a half (12 hours) at the Cornell Plantations Arboretum in the summers of 1974 and 1975 (so, 48 years ago…damn, that’s a long time) I have not felt the pain/pleasure of having my muscles get sore from a day’s work. There have probably been an odd day or two over the years, but not on a sustainable basis like I’ve done over the past year or so. Even when I came here two years ago, for the first year I let Handy Brad do all the hard work and I merely dabbled here and there. That has changed now and I am doing more and more myself. I am not silly about it and I have no qualms about hiring a day laborer or two when there is heavy lifting to be done, but the Hobbit House is a perfect example. Due to Handy Brad being busy longer than he expected to be, I have done more and more myself and I feel good about it. I also get more sore due to it and that contributes to my sleep problems in no insignificant way.
I keep a Theragun massage weapon on my bathtub sill, where I spend anywhere from 30-90 minutes in the middle of many nights. I only use it sparingly, but the fact that I leave it out and handy says a lot. In some ways, I find the balancing act I am practicing where I spend my time alternately in physical and mental pursuits to be very peaceful and healthy. As professionals, we are used to spending the bulk of our time in our heads and trying desperately to get some modicum of exercise at the gym, on a Peloton or on a tennis court. Some do that well and others, like me, do it at best, fleetingly. It’s different now. I look forward to getting out to the site in the morning. Sometimes I even rise early because the urge overwhelms me to get at whatever the latest task I have assigned myself for the day. Working men tend to operate on a 7-3 schedule rather than a 9-5 schedule. 3pm always struck me as an early quitting time, but now I am largely done in by 3pm and it makes perfect sense to me. I have now defined people by whether they shower in the morning or in the evening. I still do both, but that afternoon shower while I let the hot water pour over my shoulders feels as good as anything I do during the day. I like to leave my thinking and scheming work for the evenings when I can do it in repose.
Despite all of that feel-good doing all of this physical labor, I am still in need of more sleep. Today, while in the hot tub with my son, Thomas, after a few hours of motorcycle riding in and out of the rain, I almost dropped my phone into the water several times as I found myself nodding off. I am simply not getting enough sleep at night and seem patently unable to sleep-in to correct the situation. If I go to bed earlier, I just seem to wake up earlier in the night and perhaps even stay awake longer…like it or not. The real answer is to either stop waking up, try not to stay up reading emails if and when I do, or sleep-in later and start my day just a little later. I feel I have little control over the waking-up issue, but I can certainly try not to indulge my interest in reading the emails that keep me up for so long, sitting on the edge of the tub. But what I really want is the luxury of being able to sleep-in. The first obstacle is Betty and I feel that can be most easily solved by taking off her jangling collar at bed time. That won’t make her totally quiet, but her jangling wakes me up more often than anything else. Assuming I get past that, the next trick requires getting myself un-sore enough so that I am not writhing in discomfort and thereby forced to get up. The discomfort is not really pain, but rather just a fidgety kink, usually in my hip. It goes away immediately when I get up, so I suspect it is at least equal parts physical and mental, but I have yet to define it more exactingly.
We think of people who sleep-in as lazy of decadent, but maybe they are just more at peace than me. There is no doubt that young people and very old people are better at sleeping-in than people at in-between ages. The bad news is that I am no longer young, and there is nothing I can do about that. The good news is that I am not yet so old that I can be like Betty and sleep anywhere and for as long as I wish. I keep saying I am more at peace now than when I first came out here, that I am learning how to be at peace and not worry about things. That’s easier said than done. The worries have always been there and probably always will be. On the one hand, caring is an admirable trait that I have always aspired to. But, there is a reason why theologian Reinhold Niebuhr first penned the Serenity Prayer in 1932. Accepting the things one cannot change is a timeless thought. It was first recorded by Greek philosopher Epictetus, who said we needed to take the things outside our power, as they happen. The Buddhist scholar Shantideva put the spin that there is no reason to be glum if you can find no remedy to a problem. I wonder if any of them ever had trouble sleeping-in?