Oceanside Dock Silhouette
Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia
“A well-spent day brings happy sleep.”
– Leonardo da Vinci“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
– Ernest Hemingway
This one thing is certain: we all crave a good night’s sleep.
Our bodies need it just as much as our minds and our own well-being do.
We will do almost anything to get it, even taking sleeping pills, to achieve this shut-eye effect.
It is a need, not a want; a requirement, not an extra – if time permits.
I have noticed that often the very first thing we ask those we live with in the morning is, “How did you sleep?” Isn’t this amazing? That the first words we utter, or struggle to get out to our loved ones, is not “Hey, what’s for dinner tonight?” or, “What are we doing this weekend?” or, “Do we want to go to Maui or Vancouver Island for our vacation this year?”
None of these important matters are mentioned when one’s feet touches the ground and our bodies somehow stumble into the kitchen to get the coffee maker doing what it does best. Instead, what we often ask or try to communicate to another is how one’s rest was the night before. Only then do we enter in and ask the more pertinent questions, if any words are spoken during one’s morning routine.
“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
As we know, anything techy these days has a good ‘ole-fashioned restart button, which is mostly used when anything on our much-too-beloved devices goes wonky. Having said this, sleep is the natural restart button for us as human beings. It is the normal design for every part that makes us human: spirit, soul, and body. A good night’s rest does wonder’s to our inner core, including our beliefs and values, as well as to our mind, will, and emotions, and the physiological components we all share that makes us who we are.
Sleep, I believe, is designed to wake us up. Its natural calming effect is to do just that: namely, to calm our tri-sector beings while we rest at night and to give us the green light come the morning, in the wake of a new day.
Sleep is also like the delete button we are all so fond of when going through our emails, as a good night’s sleep deletes whatever was negative, unnecessary, or not-right from the day before; thereby, allowing us to enter our new day clear-headed and in a positive, level-headed, and well-balanced framework.
Dwight Van Middlesworth 