I can’t believe what a treat this is.
I have a friend who has been, for a while, tootling away on her trumpet about how it’s a great idea to go to bed early and not stay up late. Personally, I value that time late at night heavily, because it’s time when the house and neighbourhood are quiet, and I can do audio recording safely. Not to mention that it’s a time when I can enjoy the focus of being pettily unmindful of other people.
But now, for some reason or another, sleeping late is hard. Sleeping late after a late night is rarer, and nights of going to bed at 1 and waking up at 7 is a fine way to create a steadily growing sleep debt.
This means that this year, this December in particular, I have been extolling the practice of going to bed early. I feel like there’s a pattern easily seen and even more easily fallen into. You go to bed at 10, with your phone, dick around on the phone and go to sleep at 1. So you the next night think that well, you’re going to be up until 1 anyway, why bother going to bed, and so you stay up out of bed until say, 1 again, and then you go to bed with your phone and dick around for an hour or two, and you push this cycle.
You?
I mean me.
I mean me, I do this. I do this where I sit in my bed, on my laptop, and try to get writing done. Tonight, I’ve put down four drafts and I’m working on this one as well. In the morning, there is work to do, and I’m honestly looking forward to do it, and I want to do it while energised. I want to do it thinking about it and not slogging through it.
And that makes this moment, now, when I close my laptop at eleven o’clock and just turn off the light, head down in the dark, a treat.
A little few hours of sleep, just for me.
As a treat.