Category Archives: jetlag

On insomnia

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Couldn’t get to sleep at all last night–to coin a phrase. The creepy part of jet-lag is not that you can’t wake up or stay awake, it’s that you can’t get to sleep at night. I tossed and turned last night and nothing was comfortable, not the pillow, not the mattress, nothing. The hours ticked off–one, two, three, four, and I still couldn’t conjure up sweet dreams. The sandman would not visit my house. The worst part is that everyone else in the whole place was sound asleep. Insomnia is a solitary past-time in which the dark hours of the early morning pass slowly and painfully. Oh, one might find something to eat, read a book, or watch an old movie, but you are really missing out on all that rejuvenating sleep which totally eludes you. Sleep is the antidote for the stress and work of the day. To close your eyes and drift into unconsciousness is the only way to deal with being bone-tired, stress out, and sleepy. Yet, when sleep eludes you as if it were tiny fish in big pond, one suffers from a strange sadness, excluded from a world of dreams in which every other human being has taken refuge. Insomnia is a mean, hard, unfriendly sort that makes friends with no one. To sleep the sleep of the just plain tired is one of the priceless luxuries that no one can keep from you, but insomnia can. You can feel tired, you can feel like you should be be asleep, and you can still be wide awake. Every bone and every muscle in your body will ache, but sleep is a foreign country where you don’t have a visa and you’ve lost your map.

On insomnia

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Couldn’t get to sleep at all last night–to coin a phrase. The creepy part of jet-lag is not that you can’t wake up or stay awake, it’s that you can’t get to sleep at night. I tossed and turned last night and nothing was comfortable, not the pillow, not the mattress, nothing. The hours ticked off–one, two, three, four, and I still couldn’t conjure up sweet dreams. The sandman would not visit my house. The worst part is that everyone else in the whole place was sound asleep. Insomnia is a solitary past-time in which the dark hours of the early morning pass slowly and painfully. Oh, one might find something to eat, read a book, or watch an old movie, but you are really missing out on all that rejuvenating sleep which totally eludes you. Sleep is the antidote for the stress and work of the day. To close your eyes and drift into unconsciousness is the only way to deal with being bone-tired, stress out, and sleepy. Yet, when sleep eludes you as if it were tiny fish in big pond, one suffers from a strange sadness, excluded from a world of dreams in which every other human being has taken refuge. Insomnia is a mean, hard, unfriendly sort that makes friends with no one. To sleep the sleep of the just plain tired is one of the priceless luxuries that no one can keep from you, but insomnia can. You can feel tired, you can feel like you should be be asleep, and you can still be wide awake. Every bone and every muscle in your body will ache, but sleep is a foreign country where you don’t have a visa and you’ve lost your map.

On sleepiness

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Is there a more powerful feeling in this life than overwhelming sleepiness when your body aches for sleep, but you fight it, fighting to keep your eyes open and stay awake? We’ve all felt it after a particularly large meal, or during the Sunday morning sermon, or in a boring lecture class (with a boring powerpoint on the screen and the lights turned down low), or at a boring play, concert, or ballet. Your eye lids are heavy and want to swing down and turn off your lights. Sometimes there is no known force of will that can keep your consciousness from slipping off into the dark abyss of sleep. Your body knows you better than you do. There are times when your mind wanders, you start to think of waves lapping on the shore, of a clock’s regular ticking, of sheep jumping over a fence, of a soft wind blowing gently through the trees, of the regular whine of a huge jet engine, and before you know it, you have detached yourself from reality. You can no longer hear the pastor’s voice, you don’t know what song the orchestra is playing, you no longer care what day it is or where you are, you realize you are fishing on some unknown lake and sunlight glints gently off of the waves. You fall asleep, and the transition from awake to asleep has occurred seamlessly, realities intermingle, drift apart, mix, but you are now constructing a different reality, and the body is ignoring what is going on around you. You can try to fight sleepiness by drinking coffee, sitting up straight, focusing on what is being said, but most of that fight is just putting off the inevitable. I don’t think there is a person on earth who hasn’t fallen asleep at the wrong time at some point in their life. I am particularly bad because I like to stay up late, but this has got to change. Falling asleep during the sermon is particularly bad, but I fell asleep at the dentist office the other day while I waited for the dentist to finish some part of the procedure. What can I say, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before and the weather channel was boring that morning. I have fought sleep while listening to conference papers that were a little less than interesting. The thing is that we run from thing to thing like crazy people, but when we stop for two minutes to sit down and listen to some complicated rhetorical argument, the body takes advantage to shut down all systems for a short restorative nap, whether we like it or not. That’s the problem with sleepiness: it isn’t something that one can always control. People are killed, tragically, every day because they have fallen asleep at the wheel of their vehicle. They never intended to do that, kill themselves, but sleepiness is a stealthy adversary, and we are often asleep before we ever realized we were sleepy in the first place. I would like to say that this never happens to me, but it’s happening to me right now, and the only thing that is keeping my eyes open right now is writing this short note on “sleepiness.” If I were to put this down and walk away from the computer, I’m sure I could sleep for a good hour before ever noticing.

On sleepiness

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Is there a more powerful feeling in this life than overwhelming sleepiness when your body aches for sleep, but you fight it, fighting to keep your eyes open and stay awake? We’ve all felt it after a particularly large meal, or during the Sunday morning sermon, or in a boring lecture class (with a boring powerpoint on the screen and the lights turned down low), or at a boring play, concert, or ballet. Your eye lids are heavy and want to swing down and turn off your lights. Sometimes there is no known force of will that can keep your consciousness from slipping off into the dark abyss of sleep. Your body knows you better than you do. There are times when your mind wanders, you start to think of waves lapping on the shore, of a clock’s regular ticking, of sheep jumping over a fence, of a soft wind blowing gently through the trees, of the regular whine of a huge jet engine, and before you know it, you have detached yourself from reality. You can no longer hear the pastor’s voice, you don’t know what song the orchestra is playing, you no longer care what day it is or where you are, you realize you are fishing on some unknown lake and sunlight glints gently off of the waves. You fall asleep, and the transition from awake to asleep has occurred seamlessly, realities intermingle, drift apart, mix, but you are now constructing a different reality, and the body is ignoring what is going on around you. You can try to fight sleepiness by drinking coffee, sitting up straight, focusing on what is being said, but most of that fight is just putting off the inevitable. I don’t think there is a person on earth who hasn’t fallen asleep at the wrong time at some point in their life. I am particularly bad because I like to stay up late, but this has got to change. Falling asleep during the sermon is particularly bad, but I fell asleep at the dentist office the other day while I waited for the dentist to finish some part of the procedure. What can I say, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before and the weather channel was boring that morning. I have fought sleep while listening to conference papers that were a little less than interesting. The thing is that we run from thing to thing like crazy people, but when we stop for two minutes to sit down and listen to some complicated rhetorical argument, the body takes advantage to shut down all systems for a short restorative nap, whether we like it or not. That’s the problem with sleepiness: it isn’t something that one can always control. People are killed, tragically, every day because they have fallen asleep at the wheel of their vehicle. They never intended to do that, kill themselves, but sleepiness is a stealthy adversary, and we are often asleep before we ever realized we were sleepy in the first place. I would like to say that this never happens to me, but it’s happening to me right now, and the only thing that is keeping my eyes open right now is writing this short note on “sleepiness.” If I were to put this down and walk away from the computer, I’m sure I could sleep for a good hour before ever noticing.

On the road

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Today, I drove about sixty miles on the roads around this central Texas town, going to work, running errands, getting lunch, returning home. The road is a metaphor for life, obviously, this has been a literary commonplace for centuries whether we are with Chaucer and his pilgrims or Jack Kerouac surfing the highways of America with the Beat Generation mid-twentieth century. We hit the road to go places, and we do it more and more, which makes me wonder, what are we running to or from? Perhaps we live and work one place but our heart really belongs elsewhere. Or we love the mountains but live on the plains, or we live in the mountains but miss the ocean, the waves, the salty spray, pelicans. I doubt the grass is greener elsewhere, but sometimes I hope it is. I believe this yearning to travel, to be on the road, is a defining characteristic of the human psyche and that it is impossible to try and calm the unquiet spirit of the inner traveler who is always pushing us to hit the road. We cross oceans and seas in flimsy boats, trek across blazing deserts and frigid steppes, migrate on foot across thousands of miles of untamed wilderness because our inner gyroscopes are constantly striking out to find news spaces. We do it alone or in groups, two by two or three by three, making a pilgrimage to faraway places to see unfamiliar sites, speak foreign languages, eat strange food, sleep under unfamiliar stars, love new people, relax in new scenery. None of this is either safe or logical, sound or common sense. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to take a vacation at home where you might rest from the rigors of work and daily life instead of packing up the station wagon and striking out for territories unknown so you can risk your neck white-water rafting down a dangerous river in the middle of nowhere? Why go camping when you have a perfectly comfortable bed with clean sheets and nice pillows in your own house with no bed bugs or cockroaches or ants? The human spirit is not happy unless it is traveling, but I have no idea why. I must admit that visiting unknown sites and new people is rather thrilling. The same old thing all the time, even if it is comfortable, is boring, and if there is anything that will kill the human spirit in a big hurry it is boredom. Boredom is a killer, but again, this is a paradox because when we get out on the road in search of adventure, we are also putting ourselves in danger. Being on the road goes against self-preservation, and travelers have consistently put themselves at risk time and time again, and sometimes they never get home. Perhaps because the road is a metaphor for life, one really can’t live at all without participating in the journey, a journey that doesn’t end until they carry you out feet first and drop you down six feet deep. Sure, we can play it safe, but we won’t be happy unless we are on the road. So risk is a part of our character, but it is also a part of our collective success. Those that chose not to travel have been eliminated from the pack because they never passed on their cautionary genes, never wanting to risk anything. Ask yourself this the next time you hit the road: am I finally happy?

On the road

Posted on by

Today, I drove about sixty miles on the roads around this central Texas town, going to work, running errands, getting lunch, returning home. The road is a metaphor for life, obviously, this has been a literary commonplace for centuries whether we are with Chaucer and his pilgrims or Jack Kerouac surfing the highways of America with the Beat Generation mid-twentieth century. We hit the road to go places, and we do it more and more, which makes me wonder, what are we running to or from? Perhaps we live and work one place but our heart really belongs elsewhere. Or we love the mountains but live on the plains, or we live in the mountains but miss the ocean, the waves, the salty spray, pelicans. I doubt the grass is greener elsewhere, but sometimes I hope it is. I believe this yearning to travel, to be on the road, is a defining characteristic of the human psyche and that it is impossible to try and calm the unquiet spirit of the inner traveler who is always pushing us to hit the road. We cross oceans and seas in flimsy boats, trek across blazing deserts and frigid steppes, migrate on foot across thousands of miles of untamed wilderness because our inner gyroscopes are constantly striking out to find news spaces. We do it alone or in groups, two by two or three by three, making a pilgrimage to faraway places to see unfamiliar sites, speak foreign languages, eat strange food, sleep under unfamiliar stars, love new people, relax in new scenery. None of this is either safe or logical, sound or common sense. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to take a vacation at home where you might rest from the rigors of work and daily life instead of packing up the station wagon and striking out for territories unknown so you can risk your neck white-water rafting down a dangerous river in the middle of nowhere? Why go camping when you have a perfectly comfortable bed with clean sheets and nice pillows in your own house with no bed bugs or cockroaches or ants? The human spirit is not happy unless it is traveling, but I have no idea why. I must admit that visiting unknown sites and new people is rather thrilling. The same old thing all the time, even if it is comfortable, is boring, and if there is anything that will kill the human spirit in a big hurry it is boredom. Boredom is a killer, but again, this is a paradox because when we get out on the road in search of adventure, we are also putting ourselves in danger. Being on the road goes against self-preservation, and travelers have consistently put themselves at risk time and time again, and sometimes they never get home. Perhaps because the road is a metaphor for life, one really can’t live at all without participating in the journey, a journey that doesn’t end until they carry you out feet first and drop you down six feet deep. Sure, we can play it safe, but we won’t be happy unless we are on the road. So risk is a part of our character, but it is also a part of our collective success. Those that chose not to travel have been eliminated from the pack because they never passed on their cautionary genes, never wanting to risk anything. Ask yourself this the next time you hit the road: am I finally happy?