You know, as we get older our sleep cycles shift. Used to be that I could sleep straight through, night after night, for six hours. In bed by 11pm, up at 5am, without an alarm clock. Fairly predictable.
Things have changed—without my desire!—so that my sleeping patterns are irregular. I am desperate to get to bed before 9pm, I sleep until 1 am, and then I’m wide awake until 5am, where I sleep another hour then I’m up for the day.
I don’t spend my time in bed tossing and turning. That does no good. I’m up. I’m thinking. I’m woke.
I read, and sometimes I write. But recently I always end up in the same place.
I use the time to read a book, or browse the web, or just think. I think about the previous days or weeks, think about my experiences, think about the people I’ve met, the things I’ve said or not said, the things I’ve done or left undone. It is probably a form of conscious sleeping—I’m still turning over in my head what happened to me, processing my experiences, and trying to make sense of it all. It often isn’t very sense-ful. It just is.
This morning I came across a web page written by someone whose music I heard a few months ago, and thought, “If I get some money, I’ll order his albums.” Then, not much more. Put his albums in my shopping cart and then forgot about it.
But he wrote an essay recently that grabbed me.
To All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep – a journal by Andre Henry.
Gotta tell you, I was impacted by this.
I sat here in this chair and wept for all this, for the things he says and for the person he is. For the earnestness and the integrity and the wonderful hope this man shared, and for the many and constant ways he has been rejected and belittled, dismissed and pushed away.
It wasn’t sympathy or pity. It was something where I thought “My god, this man is just trying to love his world, and to tell the world he exists and has value, and that he himself is willing to love freely—but then his love is rejected, his life is devalued, his words are scorned. How on earth can anyone bear that? How do you go on and not break?”
It broke me to read this and to consider this.
We can survive in this world if we are hard and independent and isolated. We can withstand the insults and setbacks if we just resist harder. We can become powerful and successful given half a chance, but even if not, we can remain unbroken. We win if we survive without compromise. Stubborn and free to the very end.
But in doing so we become nothing. We are no longer the self we want to be: open, clear, connected, giving.
When we’re faced with this choice, some of us choose the hardening. We have to survive. We have to make it through. We’ll use our downtime, we say, for our own selves, but for now we gotta be strong and fierce and dominant.
And we think, “At least among my friends I can be who I really am. I can let down my hair, relax, tell my stories, listen to yours, sit in our common ground and just be.”
But hat happens when you find you can no longer sit in that common ground because you can’t turn off the anger and the justifications? Your fierceness and your independence has shaped you—warped you—so that you no longer have the intimate human connections.
Sure, you are living.
But you are not alive.
I don’t know except maybe you simply become isolated and sure and busy. Maybe you just go out this way, fitted for a box in a hole in the ground.
I know that for myself, I decided different, and that I’ve worked to connect to people and to listen. I am not good at it, but I’m making the effort.
I made the choice a while back, to use Mr. Henry’s words, that “it doesn’t have to be this way.” By “this way,” I take him to mean “we don’t have to be isolated and angry, hard and fierce, resistant and afraid.” I take him to mean “we can be ourselves, and we can let the walls down, and we can listen to one another, and we can love one another.” And “we don’t have to let the things we were taught and the things we believe and the values that we hold have the power any more over us to isolate us and to fragment us.”
I believe it’s true. I believe Mr. Henry here, and I believe in his aspirations.
And I weep because a good, kind, honest man who has tried so damned hard to give of himself has had that thrown back as not valuable, told that his words are false and his motives impure, and had his integrity mocked and dismissed.
I can imagine that pain, but I can’t imagine living through that pain.
For the people like Mr. Henry who seek to do good in this world, to heal and to restore, to love and to connect, to testify and to rejoice—I offer my praise and my admiration. And for those same people who are scorned and belittled and wounded for such efforts—I offer my own support, my ears, my heart, my shoulder, my concern.
To bring it back to the beginning, I think it is a gift to have irregular sleeping patterns and the luxury of a work/home balance where it’s not critical to work 9-5. I don’t worry about my sleep patterns anymore—they’re just what they are, and I can accommodate myself to my reality.
The bigger gift, though, is that I am awake and conscious in the darkest hours.
I know the dawn is surely coming.