Back to Basics

I’d say most bloggers (or maybe most people in Western culture) tend to live in their heads. Me too.
As I read the comments to my last post I started spinning some fancy theories at first. At one point I even told my husband, “You know, maybe the problem is that I don’t have the kind of life that allows me to get lost in anything.” He reminded me that it was me who made my life what it is. I do have a problem with getting lost in something (not literally, I find that quite easy, figuratively) but I’ll think about that some other time. After much thinking and talking and writing (because sometimes I’m a bit slow) it all came down to, “Maybe I’m feeling a little low and unmotivated because I’m so tired.” And my tiredness dies not stem from something like chronic fatigue syndrome, as my mother thought, but as I have written often before from the simple fact that I don’t go to bed early enough.

Yesterday I “tried” going to bed earlier and I succeeded, only it wasn’t early enough. Judging by the way this has been going since 2005 (when I slept enough every night for about three months) I’d guess that today I’ll be a little later than yesterday and tomorrow I will be back at my much too late bedtime.

This morning I pulled a card from one of my oracle decks which I do most days and there it was: “Back to Basics”. In the booklet it says things like:

If you neglect your basic needs, your higher awareness will diminish, leaving you to operate on adrenaline and anxiety.

Duh. And there are some questions for me as well as for you:

Are you taking loving care of your body without guilt? Are you getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, eating healthy and lovingly prepared food, and getting adequate exercise?

I even have thought of keeping track of my new “going to bed on time”-habit on my blog. But that seems so pathetic. Maybe I’ll go back to the old “sticker on the calendar”-method of motivation and keeping track. And maybe in a month or so I can report back and tell, “I did it! I’m feeling fabulous! I slept eight hours a night for four weeks in a row!”

Somehow I doubt it though. And 8 hours still isn’t enough for me, it’s just better than my usual 6 1/2. What I need is 9 hours. I know I’m insatiable. Do you even know how many hours of sleep you need?

(And speaking of healthy and lovingly prepared food, my dear husband stepped in and cooked a marvelous minestrone (which I forgot to photograph, but I was hungry). And he even cooked it on top of the wood stove!

(And just when I had posted this I read a post by Gretchen from the happiness project:”One easy key to happiness: get more sleep. That means turning off the light!” The universe is definitely trying to tell me something. She cites studies saying that sleep has a major influence on your mood, and getting one more hour of sleep would make you happier than more money…)