The Clutter of Life
It’s 5:30am again and here I am trying to make sense of my insomnia. I actually feel like I got a decent span of sleep with almost six hours uninterrupted last night, but once awakened after that amount of sleep, I am a lost soul lying in bed listening to my CPAP machine in ways that I cannot hear when I am more tired and more ready for sleep. I think this must be why man invented the nap. Who or what says that we should sleep for eight hours and be awake for sixteen? When I lived in Italy in the 60s I was amazed to find that our neighbors would don their pajamas after a large midday lunch and crawl into bed for several hours before dressing again and going out to work another three or four hours before their traditionally late suppers and their even later nighttime bedtimes. That now seems less crazy to me as I struggle to get past the six hour threshold for a night’s decent sleep. I struggle to decide whether the cause of my restlessness is more about muscle and joint soreness or a head filled with more thoughts than can be sorted out by the process of simple dreaming. One day I think I need to be more physically tired to sleep well and then, the next, I feel that I have overextended my physical comfort zone to the point of being too achy to fall asleep. Another day I have more worries on my mind (could be family issues, could be financial niggles, might even be political woes) and sense that like my cap says, “Hold on, let me overthink this…” In the battle for sleep, I have decided that the physical is a greater barrier than the mental since this very vehicle, the written word, is my mental salvation and release valve, where hauling my bulk around on 68-year old apparatus is fraught with the risk of miscalculation of capacity and can very easily cause unexpected harm.
When you are three years old and you run too fast across a lawn and trip, you go boom and get a little startled. After all, you are only a foot or two off the ground and physics suggests that you have not caused too much trauma, not that you comprehend that science just yet. So, you take a moment and decide whether to cry or carry on and then a butterfly distracts you and you are off again. When this happens at age 68, you are likely down for the count, thinking you had better not get up too quickly in case you really have injured something that will take a minimum of three months to heal. You have toppled from a great height and know that the human body has many fragile stress points and that life and comfort hinge on very delicate ligaments and tendon attachment points. You do not cry out for fear that it will draw attention to yourself and that there will be a fuss made and the next thing you know a stretcher and a gaggle of concerned citizens will be gathered around you feigning concern while they really want to express that they are glad not to be you at that moment.
That physical reality is exactly opposite the mental anxiety creation process. Aging has made us much more aware that life does not end so quickly or so dramatically most often. When we are young, everything is new and we worry needlessly about things that later life makes us realize will likely flow over us without notice. I can think my way out of almost any worry with one rationalization or another in ways that I cannot with a simple stabbing pain in my knee or shoulder. Physical pain is all-consuming and the ultimate distraction. It causes us to forget everything and lose sight of anything. With whatever mental anguish I may encounter at this age, a passing butterfly can derail me to thinking that life is beautiful. I guess that makes me a mental toddler of sorts and a physical Methuselah.
Lately, I have been enjoying starting my day in my office. It is located at the far northern end of our one-level laterally sprawling house. It was an addition put on by the previous owner and it lies beyond our master bath and is thus quite a distance from the main activity centers of the house. While at times that seems inconvenient if I have forgotten something in here and have to walk the distance to retrieve it, for the most part, it is good to have the office more remote and distant as it is. I have my desk in an alcove with windows on three sides, so I am as connected with my outdoor surroundings as I possibly could be. That is also a helpful element to my sense of well-being. It is the perfect place to write and pursue my life of the mind in a tranquil spot that feels very private and quite peaceful. With the ocean out in the distance to my left, the mountains out in the distance straight ahead and a cactus and succulent knoll with passing birds and critters to my right, so close that I feel I could touch it, I cannot imagine a nicer spot to ponder the world. And the vastness of the void in front of me is contrasted by the clutter of life that I have gathered around me in the office. This is the place in the house that Kim and I have both agreed will be our repository for the memorabilia of our lives.
Every inch of wall space has a story to tell. I count twenty-three separate items on the walls just in my little alcove. The dominant themes are my history of motorcycling (7 items), my family (5 items), my places of past residence (5 items), my career (4 items), and my miscellaneous pleasures (2 items). I don’t know that I would rank them that way, but that’s the way they stack up on the walls. There is a large glass table that used to be our dining table that I designed and crafted as a curio table with an ash tray of black sand sprinkled with antiquities and curios that drift under the glass surface. The large double built-in bookcase is chock-a-block with mementos of both Kim’s and my life’s passions. They range from Knick-knacks picked up on our travels to plastic statues of the kids in Halloween Costumes over fifteen years. That leaves very little room for books, which, strangely enough, I choose to stack in two vertical bookshelves that I consider to be quite handy for displaying favorite tomes. This room is both very functional for working (both Kim and I have desk stations with computers and printers), comfortable for meeting (that big table has several very comfortable arm chairs), and yet filled to the brim with every imaginable bit of trivia of our lives that we can imagine. Just on the window sills beside me I see four motorcycles, a Dammit Doll (for frustration), a mouth harp (don’t ask), a brass Tasmanian Devil, a magnetized ball bearing sculpture, a glass block with a giant observation wheel imbedded, a battery-operated “Let me out of here!” toy crate (a remnant of being vanquished in a corporate merger), a crystal mountain, a monocular, a row of metallic spinning tops made of five different exotic metals, a metal tin of “Mac & Cheese Candy”, an Atlas Shrugged pen holder, an HP 12C Financial calculator, Apple earbuds, a metal Brooklyn Bridge (which I overlooked from my apartment in the Seaport for ten years) and a lucite announcing the acquisition of Bankers Trust by Deutsche Bank (my biggest money-making life event).
Our lives are a random clutter of junk and to think, this is just the junk I didn’t have the heart to throw away during the multiple purges I have gone through to get to this place of peace. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep?