I am writing this at 9 AM because at 1:30 AM this morning I was asleep.
At 1:00 AM this morning I was not asleep, but only because I was awakened by the still brilliantly lit lamp on my husband’s side of the bed. The light brought to my dull-witted attention the fact that at 1:00 AM my husband had not yet come to bed.
I debated rolling back over and returning to sleep, but with a sigh I flipped back the covers and tossed my legs out of bed. I plodded across the bedroom carpet and walked down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs I stood in the doorway of the den and squinted into the bright light of the den. My wide-awake husband was there peering at the computer screen.
“It’s pretty late,” I grumbled from the doorway.
“Come see this,” he replied with a smile and a come hither gesture of the hand.
I shuffled into the room and leaned forward to look at the computer screen through eyelid slits.
My husband is a computer programmer and in the 30 seconds that followed he showed me his night’s work. Even mostly asleep I could recognize that he was working on a pretty clever widget.
“You don’t like it, ” he said as I looked at the screen in silence.
“No, I like it,” I replied, “but it’s late.”
“I know,” he said, “but this is so neat. I just have one more little problem to solve and I’ll be up to bed.”
“Okay,” I replied and turned to trudge back up the stairs.
In the quiet darkness of the stairwell I could hear him tapping away on the keyboard. I dropped back into bed, snuggled under the covers and fell immediately back to sleep because I knew I had to get up at 6:00 AM.
Sometimes I have good ideas, too, but you know, if it’s 9:30 PM I just have to put them on the back burner because 10 PM is my bedtime. I don’t mean that I just have to be in bed by 10:00 PM, but I have to be asleep by then, because at 6:00 AM the next morning I know that my alarm will go off. At 6:00 AM the next morning I am going to have to roll out of bed, take a shower and start the next day. I will have a new set of problems to deal with that day, so I cannot be up too late the night before solving other problems or I will be tired. I could have solved yesterday’s problem, stayed up and done some extra work, but, you know, it was my bedtime and I need my sleep.
All right, all right…..actually I am writing this at 1:40 AM because I am awake, but I don’t want to be. I did go back to bed and close my eyes like I was going to fall asleep, but couldn’t. I couldn’t because it occurred to me that I did want to write this down just to assure myself that I , too, can be successful except that I know my limits and I need my beauty sleep. And , of course, I do need my beauty sleep and I was going to get it, but I was afraid that I would completely forget everything by morning. Despite getting lots of sleep in my lifetime I still have trouble remembering things from one day to the next.
Now it really is way past my bedtime and I will be tired and cranky in the morning!