52 To Do

It wasn’t too hard to wake up for sunrise this morning because I had a pretty fitful night of sleep. I had all the good intentions of “early to bed, early to rise…”, but it didn’t work out that way. I was in bed by 9:30 so I could get up at 5:15 to go to a 6:00am yoga class with a friend. An hour or so later I woke up to my husband (as we say in the South “bless his little heart”) calling me to say goodnight from NYC where he was out with a friend.

I tried to slide back into sleep, but my mind started wandering to different projects I’m working on and before I knew it I was wide awake, my mind racing. Then it was too warm to sleep and the wind started up outside which rattles the house it’s so strong. I knew I had to get up early and needed to get to sleep which made it even harder because it put even more pressure on sleeping. I feel for people who suffer from insomnia.

There’s an old saying “a good conscience is a soft pillow”. I used to be a much sounder sleeper and in the last year I’ve been slowly getting better about it. It was hard for me to sleep for awhile when I went through my divorce four years ago. It was something I could never completely reconcile with myself, even though it was the right decision. That was then compounded by a high-pressured advertising job in LA where I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough. I got to a point where I was literally working in my sleep.

This project inevitably gets me to look at things in different ways than I have before. Even when I know clearly what I want to do at the beginning of a week, as the week progresses it often leads me in different directions. I think as much as this week is about testing out the morning person side of me, I think even more so I want it to be a reclamation of wonderful, deep sleep.

Maybe it’s time to officially put my conscience to rest.