Almost There....

It's never fun having insomnia, but it's worse on a Sunday night. That's the night you should be resting for the new week, but for whatever reason - and there are many - it's the night I'm most prone to sleeplessness. Sometimes it can happen twice in a month, and then not at all for a number of months. Sometimes I see what I have done to cause the problem - working too late into the night, doing something that I should haven't been doing late at night (such as drinking or eating). Sometimes I just can't help stop the ideas in my head from jumping back and forth across my brain like ping pong balls.

But I think part of why I didn't sleep last night is that tomorrow is the election and I realize that after that day everything will change in our country in some fundamental way. And I'm worrying now that I haven't done enough to help the causes that I believe in. That I haven't made enough calls. That I haven't gotten enough involved. I dozed off momentarily last night and quickly fell into turbulent dreams, and in all of them I felt that I had somehow failed. That I hadn't been good enough to my beautiful partner Brian, or my family, or to the people I work with, or to myself. But that's what happens when you think when you should be sleeping, whether the imminent election is really the reason you can't quiet your mind. You don't tend to look at the bright side when your exhausted and wanting nothing more than a little bit of sleep.

But insomnia also is a powerful truth serum of sorts. You lie there and in the deep quiet of the night your only companion seems to be the truth itself. This can bring a strange sense of wonderment at life when you realize that despite the turmoil and struggle of the moment you have managed to find love and other things that make life meaningful. But this can also bring great sadness as you realize your own limitations, your lack of achievement, your sense that even the most vivid dreams for the future can elude us.

As the dawn breaks weakly on this gray autumn morning (the photo here is looking west from the lower level of our house in the Hudson Valley), I am sad that I have lost a precious night of rest, but I also suspect that this feeling will pass just as quickly when I finally get some sleep tonight. And when dawn breaks on Tuesday the election will be here, and regardless of the outcome, at least this one huge, spinning unknown will be revealed. Depending on what happens I realize, happily, that it might finally time to change the name of this blog to something more appropriate, like Stay Awake - and Be Glad! For an occasional insomniac like me, something tells me I'll be up for the challenge.

We're almost there, but it's still a day and a world away.