My Year of Hopefulness - Cleansing

It's the middle of the night and I'm having a tough time sleeping. I've become accustomed to insomnia as I've had it off and on for most of my life. Tonight is a little eerie though. I'm awake because of the wind. It's keeping me up long past my bedtime. It's so gusty that as I was walking back to my friend, Amber's, apartment, I could feel the weather bearing down on me. For a moment I almost lost my footing. You'd think this was Chicago in the winter the way the gusts are going. We rarely have wind like this, especially at the beginning of September.

I can't help but think that this odd wind is a way for the greater universe to say to me that my life is being cleaned out, and it must be this way as tough as the circumstances may be. With these gusts will go all of the bad energy from the fire. And with that energy will go the fear as well - mine, and my neighbors', family's, and friend's fears, too. Rather than it being a disturbing wind, perhaps it's trying to be of great use at a time of great need. Maybe a strong, forceful wind is exactly what's called for in times of stress. At least I'm hoping that's the case.

As I headed from The Empire Hotel toward the subway tonight, for a second I thought "damn, all my warm clothes might be ruined. I have nothing to wear!" And then a second later I started laughing, out loud. Who cares? So I will have to buy some new warm clothing now that Fall has arrived. I stopped for a moment right by Columbus Circle and looked up at the sky, the clouds faintly swirling and swishing in the very dark sky. I said a prayer to whatever and whoever is up there looking down on me, blowing all the smoke away so that I might see and think a bit more clearly. "Thank you," I said. "I'm glad I'm here to witness this." And I've never meant any 9 words more in my life.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

The Journal of Cultural Conversation - Take a Nap, or Don't

My latest post on The Journal of Cultural Conversation (TJCC) is up: Take a Nap, or Don't, an update of my continued research on insomnia. Does sleep help creativity? Does insomnia help creativity? Science weighs in...

My writing partner and collaborator, Laura Cococcia, is the creative genius behind TJCC and has asked me to write for the site every Monday. I will repost all links to my TJCC articles on this blog and on my Twitter account.

My Year of Hopefulness - Energy Level

"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Perhaps it is that the heart beats faster here than elsewhere." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day

Spoken like a true insomniac. I don't know for sure if Simone de Beauvoir had insomnia, though I do understand her sentiments about New York as she made her way across the U.S. in 1947. Her diary from that year long trek from one U.S. coast to the other became the book America Day by Day. Her first step that journey was off a plane and into New York.

There does seem to be an energy here in this city that I have not found in other places. Maybe it's the subway rattling underneath the pavement or the soaring buildings that mask the city in a unique pattern of shade and light. I think though that it's the people that are attracted to New York that give it its famous zing.

The trick to living here and staying sane is to take advantage of the energy while not wearing ourselves out, to find activities to fill our time that give us as much energy as they require. I've struggled with this idea at various times in my 11 year love affair with New York. While I've moved in and out of the city 4 times since first coming here in 1998, this last time I hit upon the magic combination: a stable income, lots of green space just outside more door, and confidence in who I am. I spend equal time with friends as I do alone. I found an activity I love, writing, that has nothing to do with how I pay my rent. All this combined has made for a magical life. Now all I need is a dog - and he'll be arriving at my apartment this Fall.

Even when I wasn't living here, New York was the center of my world. New York was really it for me. It always was; I just didn't always know that. It's the place where I feel most alive, where I feel most my true self. It's the place where I can dream and imagine and wonder. It's the place where I can appreciate and love the life I have, while also aspiring to be something more.

As it is with so many relationships, it took time away to realize what I had here in this tiny set of islands. New York is a place of constant improvement, continual opportunity, and hopeful exuberance. You really can be anyone here, all it takes is time and commitment and on occasion, a little patience. Lucky for us, Simone de Beauvoir was right: our need for sleep is less here, making accomplishment, and thereby happiness and fulfillment, all the more likely.

The photo above is the New York City skyline at night. You can find this photo at: http://nycwrites.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/nyc_manhattan_night.183194354_std.jpg

Smoothing ruffled minds

Last night, I went to listen to my friend, Dan's, DJ mix at the Time Out New York Lounge at New World Stages. His show, Lush & Lively, features a fabulous mix of groovy re-creations of old standards. The music really just makes me smile. I hadn't seen Dan in over a month - a travesty as I am used to seeing about once a week. Times gets away from us too easily. This started me down the road to thinking about how much our busy lives actually effect the state of our minds.

I came across a quote today by Charlotte Bronte that could be the mantra for all of us that suffer from time to time, or all the time as the case may be, from insomnia. "A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow." A large part of my sleeping problems are self-induced. My mind is working so fast so often that it has a hard time going to sleep. It is stubborn about turning off.

Meditation helps. Yoga helps even more because it pairs meditation with physical activity. I've been known to run simply to exhaust myself as much as possible. What really helps is slowing down and I am growing more conscious of my ability to slow down my life despite the world's efforts to continuously speed it up.

Yesterday, I was meeting Dan at 6, precisely, so that way I could get somewhere else by 7:30, and be home by exactly 10 to finish up some work before going to bed. Fine to do on occasion. Ludicrous to think that kind of rigid planning in my social life is sustainable. So I moved my 7:30 back half an hour, and lengthened by then-8:00 by half an hour. I gave myself some room to breathe, and I was able to get a better night's sleep because I hadn't felt rushed all evening long to get here, there, and everywhere.

To be sure, valuing your time as the most precious resource on the planet is a difficult task because demands are placed upon you by external sources. However, giving myself the permission to control the impact of those outside sources, even if just for one evening, yields such good results that I'm having difficulty valuing my time as anything less than precious. Could that one decision be the key to calming down our ruffled minds?

The image above can be found at: http://startupblog.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/salvador-dali-clock.jpg

Omnitasking: the latest buzz word to feed our frenzy for efficiency

I'm scared. Really scared for all of us. Instances of insomnia are rising, stress levels among Americans are at an all-time high. At this rate, burn-out may actually become a diagnosable disease. In my bio on this blog you will read that I am a "recovering multi-tasker." Like most people recovering from an addiction to anything, it's my continuous commitment to myself to not get caught in the trap of always thinking I must do 18 things at once.

So imagine my horror when I learned about the latest term in task-ology: omnitasking, meaning that you are working on tasks at every moment from everywhere. I was almost seized by tremors and an enormous migraine just thinking about being an omnitasker. Zippo downtime. Frightening.

I also think this may be the universe's reminder to me that it's time to back away, slowly, from the frenzy and the pressure that reading posts like http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK2FR8DTV9Q2KS1 cause me. With omnitasking, there is no time for reflection, or even enjoying the task at hand. You must always be looking ahead, to the next task that needs completion. And that kind of behavior kills creativity, literally forces you to ignore any kind of intuition senors that we may have.

There have been a lot of scientific studies that come to the conclusion that multi-tasking beyond a certain point actually lowers our IQ. Taking that one step further, does omnitasking do away with our intelligence altogether?