When I was a kid I loved to sleep late. I'd usually let myself sleep in, or at least lounge about in the bed pretending to sleep, until 11:30am. Getting up earlier than that felt like missing part of the full indulgence, kind of like leaving 1/2 a piece of warm moist chocolate cake on your plate. Getting up any later than 11:30am felt a little too indulgent like sleeping the whole day away...or like eating the entire cake.
This desire to "catch up" and sleep in did not go away at first just because I became an adult. Definitely was still there in my 20s, only the magic wake up time backed up to 10-10:30am. In my thirties my magic indulgence rousing time became 9-10am. I just didn't want to face the full brightness of the light!
But in my 40s the real shift occurred. Now I LOVE to wake up early, ideally between 5am and 7am. I don't like to sleep any later, and in fact if on a rare occasion I sleep past 7am I feel like I lost some of my precious day! I now freaking crave facing the light. 馃馃寘
No judgement from me if you still like to sleep late as I'm sure you have your own reasons. All I can do is tell how it is for me, and for the first time I saw all of this clearly this morning as the sunlight peeked thorough my curtains at 6:30am. I had a big insight of how/why my feelings about facing the morning have changed.
There is a pattern between my quality of life and my desire to sleep late vs wake up early. When I enjoyed and craved later wake up times I also tended to stay up later into the night. Back then I longed for that quiet time in the dark evening when I could be alone, escape from the problems of my day, finally do what I wanted to do, not work and just relax. Me time. It felt like a personal indulgence to stay up late into the night, once everyone else in the house was sleep, and to get to hide out in the darkness. Also naturally I wanted to sleep in as late as I could the next morning, blocking out the sunlight from my bedroom, denying that it was daytime, and avoid for as long as I could the callings and responsibilities of the new day.
My habits have changed. 馃檹馃徑 Basically now I seek more and more awakening! This morning as the sun peeked through my curtains I was happy and eager to sit up and start my day. There's nothing in my life that I want to deny or hide from by rolling away from the light and pulling the covers back up and over my head. There is nothing in my life that I want to avoid or not face today. I don't want to go back to living that way...avoiding and hiding in the darkness. Are there some conversations I need to have with people that I care about that will be difficult? Absolutely. Is there work to be done, parts of which I won't enjoy? Of course. But how you do anything is how you do everything...so when those difficult conversations arise like the bright sunlight hitting my sleepy eyes this morning, I will converse. When it's time to do the work that's hard and not fun, I will work.
This shift in how I approach life, from hiding and avoiding in the covers of darkness to embracing the day and the light, has happened over the last few years and has changed everything for me. What I could not have predicted was that it gets easier and easier to face the truths of your day and have those awkward talks the more you do them. Imagine right now if you will that all the things you are struggling to hold together, or avoid, going away. All of the worries about, "this can't happen, that must happen, she better not bring up the topic of X, this has to go a certain way(!!!)" ...just vanishing.
I guess what I am talking about here resulted from my resolving a deeper issue... You can't just fake wellness to invoke the cure. My cure was centering. Finding or revealing my center and strengthening it so that I was capable of having those difficult conversations. How and why that all went down will be a story for another day.