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Notes From Here & Now: This Too Shall Pass
May 07, 2024
Dear Human –
Sleeping is so easy that anyone can do it with their eyes closed. So I'm told. I do love my bed, but over the last decade, I have suffered periods of crippling insomnia for reasons I can never quite discern.
It's not like it comes on in moments of extreme stress of busyness, but rather seems to have a pattern of its own. While I used to get quite panicked about it, over the years I've learned two things: firstly, I seem to be able to operate okay (not great, but okay) on two or so hours sleep a night. I don't think I'm quite in the camp of Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Thatcher Obama, Trump, or Nikola Tesla – who all famously average only four or so hours of sleep a night as their norm – but I seem to be able to operate (without too much catastrophe) on two to three hours sleep for weeks or months at a time.
I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders, feeling great, or likely to produce my best work, but knowing I can complete basic tasks fairly competently takes the stage fright and panic away, to a degree.
To anyone else out there in a similar rut, the other thing I've learned is that, as my dad seems to say about all problems: this too shall pass. Eventually, good long sleep-filled nights will return. So, while I am several weeks into a bout of industrial-level sleeplessness, I'm confident that, like the seemingly endless torrent of Irish wet weather in which I write, this will blow over soon enough.
It can't rain forever. Right?
On a brighter note, we've started work on a small kitchen extension in our home. It's been refreshing to see that a pile of mud and rubble can captivate my kids more than iPads ever could. It's a joy to watch them fully immersed in imaginative play, armed with nothing other than inanimate props. Though, how they manage to get mud on the underside of my record player is beyond me, and certainly won't be missed when the building work is complete.
Until next time.
–Oliver