Nocturnal Questions
Starry Night Over the Rhône, artwork by Vincent van Gogh
My beige table-top was blooming out again and again with white blinks. My phone was giving alerts in its silent mode. I received notifications of my friend’s each post. She was on a self-care mission. Her post showed that she researched well and poked each one of us to rely on her jotted down list. She put a big asterisk mark on morning routines; her afternoons were well defined with library work and then she added some skin-care hacks; the evenings were not given the potential priority on that long list.
After a couple of weeks, she looked extremely tired; she got big dark circles, although she never ditched any parts of the list. She was changing, but not for good. Our classmates were cracking jokes at her, “How did you go wrong with self-love? How did you become a spider if you’re trying to be a princess?”
She cringed; she said, “It’s just the beginning guys; you need to go on.”
After a few days, when we almost pulled out her ear with our questions, she finally spelled the bean. She said with a sigh, “I am not getting enough sleep... well, okay; I felt I could manage that with 3-4 hours!”
“Hey, but you overruled the priority!” We all almost shouted that similar ‘sense’ in different sentences.
When we go for that timetable check list, we often focus on “the starting point” which often unconsciously ignores “the last part of the day”, the nights. But here are some questions, “What do you expect from your nights? What is the one thing you want for rejuvenation? What are the factors that keep you ahead with ‘unwinding’?
The question list could go on, but the answer would always come in one form. It is ‘sleep’. We particularly avoid the concept of a healthy night. We do the leftover work; we manage our social media life at night; we watch films or series; or we just enjoy the solitude shots. In short, it passes on without a fortunate conclusion. The harsh truth is here that ‘the night life’ is not taken care of as it should be at the juncture of chaos.
But how should a night look like at your home? It could be answered with aesthetic value, with aromatherapy kind of emblem, or with a cute selfie with an eye-mask on. No matter what we do, we should have a clock that would proudly say, “Yeah, you have slept for 8 hours.”
Sleep is not at all a glorified tick off on our to-do list. It’s our primary functionality, and we can’t ignore that. We just need one shelter where our minds will whisper only in our dreams. The management factors of a busy lifestyle chop off that basic need when the next day could bring much more freshness if some simple nocturnal steps are taken. Uninterrupted sleep schedule can make the morning routines even more content and free-flowing. I call that fondness Ina*. The quotidian pleats can get a long warm shelter if we just make a ‘sleepy space’ for them.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)