It can be hard to sleep when we’re wide awake. It’s like trying to sleep during the daytime when we’re alert and full of energy. When it’s late and we need to sleep but we can’t, it’s like we know we’re losing sleep, know that we’ll be tired tomorrow, but even if we try, we can’t go to sleep for one reason or another.
We close our eyes, hoping that our thoughts will be quieted, hoping for tiredness to set in. But there’s still noise in our minds–discourse, music and sounds, perhaps. It’s like there’s brouhaha in our thoughts, and we can’t seem to escape it no matter where we go.
We jump out of bed, moving about restlessly as we try to figure out why we can’t sleep. In the process, we realize that there was something lingering in our thoughts–something troubling us, something that needs an answer, something that doesn’t want to be set aside any longer. It could be a question, an enigma, or a dilemma that we need to figure out.
That worry kept us awake. It hid from us, stood in the shadows of our thoughts rather than in the forefront of our minds. But once we became aware of it, we knew why we couldn’t sleep. And as soon as we addressed it, our minds could easily slumber.
Fallton Havenstonne 