What is the point at which it’s not worth trying to go back to sleep? It seems to be getting earlier. Today it was 4:20 when I woke. Given that it takes me at least 2 hours to get back to sleep, and my normal getting up time is 6, I wonder what is the point of waiting for sleep to return? I’m tired, but not relaxed. I get up, read for a while, go back to bed, lie there, feeling the tension, trying to still my mind. The irony is that I made my rising time earlier to try and escape this problem, but it has just shifted it. I thought about switching off the alarm and letting sleep come when it will, I did that one day last weekend. But I’m used to having this time in the mornings now, I don’t like to give it up. So, I got up at 5 to 6 (resentful at the hour and a half I had wasted), fed the cats, did my meditation, came up here to the attic, started to write.
I heard a trailer yesterday for ‘Desert Island Discs’ with a composer, I think his name is Howard Goodall – somebody Goodall, anyway, like the chimp lady. He was saying that ever since childhood, he has always had music running through his head, all the time, and he just has to catch it and write it down. It took him a while to work out that not everybody has that. That really is pretty amazing. All I have is words running through my head all the time, and have had ever since I was a child, some of the time I write them down, mostly I just let them drift away from me. I’ve always taken it for granted. I don’t know how unusual or normal it is, I don’t usually think about it in that detail. But maybe if it’s possible for some people to have this thing with music, maybe it’s not so normal, maybe not everybody has it, maybe some people have images, or numbers, or mathematical formulae, or coloured dots, or, like Homer Simpson, cans of beer. Who knows? But the way he said it really struck a chord with me, a feeling of ‘That’s exactly how I am with words!’ How much control do I have over the flow? Some, obviously, not as much as I’d like, probably I could have more if I trained myself better. If I HAVE to write something about a specific topic, rather than just letting it flow, I can do it, usually, most of the time. But most of the time I just don’t bother, I write whatever pops up That’s what I’m doing now, what I do every morning.
I’m going to do some gardening today. It’s about time. I need to get out of this machine and into the world for a while. I’ve got many things out of the way, but there is still more to deal with, more that needs to be done in the next two weeks. I just haven’t thought it through properly yet. But I’ll have one day trying to sort out my weedy and neglected borders.