Sleeping is the Enemy
It’s 6:30am in Antalya, Turkey, do you know where your mind is? Sleep is such a funny thing. There are times when the need for it is so desperately that I can literally stare at a page I am writing and see that I have drifted off into incoherence over three words, one of which is complete gibberish. And there are other times when I can put on my C-PAP mask and hear every breath I take for thirty minutes with nothing else occupying my thoughts and still not find that illusive slumber beast. Waking up in a strange one-night-stand hotel in a city I am unlikely to ever be in again in my life is also a sleep-related treat. While I am blessed to always awaken with full awareness of my place and surrounding (never having wondered “where am I?”), I am compos mentis enough to know that I must be careful figuring out in the dark where furniture, doors and obstacles are located. Having a handy iPhone or iPad is both blessing and curse. The guiding light from a digital communicator is a great euphemism for our lives in modern society. It’s a tool to get you to the hotel bathroom and yet it is a tool to distract you from further sleep. To begin with, it tells you the time. Is that a help or a hindrance? I like to know the time since it advises me on whether more sleep is warranted, likely or an efficient use of scarce resources. Is it worth it to try to revert to a sleep state at 6am when you are leaving the hotel at 9am fully repacked? There is breakfast to be taken or not (how easy or hard is to acquire in this particular hotel at this particular time of morning?). There is a shower to be taken or not (had one last night, but was a sweaty night or a dry night?). Do I have email or writing that needs doing? (Is the email more or less pressing?). Of course, the double-edged sword of having so much great information at our fingertips is that it puts the mind into gear and the sleep issue quickly becomes moot.
The 1990’s TV series Friends had a great character, Joey. His best line ever was when he said, “Moot, you know, like a cow’s opinion, it means nothing.” Well, degree of wakefulness to the issue of sleep decision-making is anything but a cow’s opinion. At this point in the morning, I have over-thought myself into an advanced state of mindfulness. That is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, I am using the time to good purpose. My trusty iPad has already thrown several in-depth articles at me about the latest Ukraine and Turkish affairs that are both irrelevant and highly relevant to my day. Strangely enough, the irrelevant is likely highly relevant long term (what can be more important to my well-being than whether Donald Trump is finally deposed and sent packing to the oblivion he so richly deserves) and the relevant (given that I am a mere 530 miles from the bombing and fighting on the Turkey/Syria border) is likely you become highly irrelevant to my daily existence once I board a plane at Istanbul airport in a few days (not that the suffering of foreign peoples deserves relegation to mindshare back-burnering, but life does go on for those of us not directly involved).
So I have now set aside sleep for this morning and must confront my daily reality. First there is the darkened room and my lovely sleeping beauty across the bed. Ah-ha! There is a terrace with a grand view and it’s 73 degrees out. There is my momentary salvation, so I find my way out of doors. What greets me is the blue Mediterranean Sea, as lovely and calm as ever, with early-morning swimmers enjoying a refreshing dip (if I had an extra two hours I would be tempted to deal with a wet bathing suit in my bag). Across the open bay drifts a two-masted gulet off to some sort of excursion, but looking ever so picturesque for us tourists as it motors slowly by. But then there are the distant towering and majestic Taurus Mountains and specifically Mt. Olympus that we traversed yesterday on our motorcycles. What a sight to stare at on a clear, warm, October motorcycle-vacationing morning. It’s enough to make me count my many blessings and awareness that life is good.
In the room I hear my wife’s iPhone alarm go off. It’s a ringtone of the start of the song, Bring Me Sunshine, which she does for me each and every day. It is now officially time to wake-up. I have squandered my early morning with these musings, but here’s the thing… I think these musings are the very best of my life. I insist on counting my blessings each and every day and for me, a morning person by nature, there is no better time to do that than in the stillness of the morning before reality and daily tasks take hold. We will drive over the Anatolian Plateau today to what is being billed as a very traditional interior Turkish town of Konya. It is well off the beaten tourist path, but happens to lie directly in our path to the fabled Cappadocia, where we end our biking journey with the flourish of a promised hot air balloon adventure. That will start at 5am so any morning musings will need to be set aside for caution’s sake.
Sleep is a wonderful energizer. It allows us to capture the day and process it to a fully internalized state. It soothes sore muscles. It prepares us for our next adventure. But we owe it to ourselves to drink sparingly from that faucet. Sleep will command us to slow down when we ignore it, so worry not about missing out on it. As my Welsh friend Michael likes to say, “You’re a long time Dead, Boyo!”