GOING WITH THE FLOW
OCT 4 — day 12/13
Yesterday was a no writing day. I was busy from morning until I dropped into bed exceptionally early for me — before midnight. I was tired out. Usually I stick to a routine, but yesterday I was all over the place — not a spare minute. Unexpected things kept taking up time, but in a really good way. Since I felt so tired around 11 o’clock, I decided to do something really off the wall for me: I went to bed without taking so much as magnesium tablet (meant to relax the muscles).
Normally I’m quite neurotic about sleep because there’s so much hype about it. “We need 7 hours of quality sleep to function well.” “We can have two periods of 3 to 4 hours of sleep during a night as long as we get enough quality sleep.” “If we don’t get adequate sleep, we’ll get dementia (Alzheimer's, early death, diseases) and worse.” The list goes on. If anything will keep a person awake, it’s worrying about not getting the recommended amount of sleep. I’m not sure who’s doing the studies, who’s taking part in them, how old the subjects are, or how they measure whether or not people have died too soon; I mean, you have to wonder, don’t you?
The other question that arises is how people in other cultures manage. Does everyone in every country get 7 hours of quality sleep or are they suffering from early dementia and death? Are they cognitively impaired? I think about that and look for signs that countries are failing because their people don’t get enough “quality” sleep.
Anyway, moving on….I decided to let the chips fall where they may — go with the flow — and see what happened. I fell asleep right away (because I don’t remember lying awake worrying about not sleeping) and woke up at 4:30 a.m. Too soon! was my first thought. OMG how can I get back to sleep and get 7 hours? Then I remembered I was going au naturel, so to speak, and after doing some stretches in bed, I got up. Taking my time I made a fresh batch of my own granola recipe, cleaned up the kitchen, put some chanting on YouTube and did about 20 minutes of meditation with candles, incense, the whole shtick. Then I did some qigong exercises, took a shower, made my bed — all the while waiting to feel tired and cognitively impaired etc. By 8 o’clock I’d finished and sat down to write. “So this is going with the flow”, I thought.
In keeping with the idea of living in the NOW that all the gurus talk about, I have not decided to make this my daily routine. If I feel like doing this tomorrow, I will — although I won’t need to make any more granola for a while. As far as I can grasp the concept, going with the flow means just dealing with what arises and not obsessing about what one should be doing. Living in the now is the way to avoid unnecessary stress, they say. Well, we’ll see. I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in my ability to not freak out about what I’m not doing that I should be doing. And it’s not as if I haven’t come across this idea before — many, many times. I started along this path about 50 years ago. So much for wisdom growing with age. Perhaps I wasn’t getting it because I wasn’t getting enough quality sleep, ho ho. For now, I’ll sleep when I damn well feel like it and get up ditto and let the chips fall etc.!
