Don’t get me wrong. I, too, am guilty of staying up till dawn, which I always end up regretting in the morning whenever I hurriedly leave my place to get to the office in time (with unbrushed hair, if I may add), because the Internet is just amazing and addicting like that. I, too, have sacrificed a few more hours of sleep just so I could go out with my friends despite having work the next day (let me quote, “No one looks back on their life and remembers the nights they had plenty of sleep.”). I, too, had procrastinated so much that I had little to no sleep a night before school work deadlines. All those instances were choices I personally made, choices that ironically left me with no choice but to sacrifice hours I could have spent sleeping.
And because of all those instances and more, I find sleep all the more attractive and beautiful. I most especially cherish my Saturday nights when I get to sleep as much as I can since I don’t have work to think about on Sundays. (I’m not gonna tell you about that one time I woke up at 4:30pm on one fine Sunday afternoon… I’ll probably remember that night I had plenty of sleep… Haha.)
I’ve always found some kind of comfort in the idea of sleeping. You get to shut down your mind and body for a certain period of time. You get to detach yourself from your problems, your thoughts, and your feelings. Of course, they come rushing back once you wake up, but you could totally have a different perspective on things after sleeping for a while. Sleep allows you to put your life on hold when things get rough without actually giving up (because let’s face it, there’s never good enough a reason to give up on life). It also allows you to be unproductive, but you can’t even feel too bad about that because you know deep inside that that was what you needed. Sleep is therapeutical, as long as you don’t overdo it. At one bad point in my life, I had experienced sleeping all day. I would wake up for a few minutes and go back to sleep right away without even thinking about eating. Of course, I know better now. I’ve learned along the way. But those were certainly other instances that made me appreciate the beauty of sleep even more.
Some people might consider sleep as a kind of escape and, in a way, it is. But that escape is temporary. You don’t actually run away from your problems. It just allows you to pause things for a while and give you the opportunity to see things clearly. I remember my thesis mates and I taking a lot of our so-called nappy times when we couldn’t go as far as writing more than two sentences for our thesis paper. Sure, it seemed unproductive, but in the end, we would panic for wasting so much time and end up being more focused somehow (okay…maybe this isn’t 100% accurate haha, but I don’t regret any of those nappy times okay and we actually did better than what we had expected).
Sleep has been a great friend of mine and it continues to be. I rely on it whenever I need a break from everything and everyone and I always get a fresh perspective on things afterwards. It has calmed and soothed me too many times that I cannot help but be grateful that I get the chance to wake up once more each time and live my life as I am supposed to.
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