I’m writing this one at night time. I mean, not that you care, or anything. You’re reading it whenever you’re reading it, right?
But for me, to be writing at night is…well. It’s difficult. Afternoon, even, is difficult. I’m best in the mornings. Good till one or two o’clock. By four, my attention is starting to flag. I shouldn’t do anything important after five. Tidy my desk, maybe.
And night time, these evening hours before dark and bed, but after the day is done — these are the hardest. These are the hours when thoughts I don’t want to think come unbidden to my mind, and pasts I don’t wish to relive tap me on the shoulder as I’m loading the dishwasher, say, “Hey there, remember me?”
Night time is the time when all those bright tasks I set out for myself in the morning are far in the distance, and when I turn to look back at them, they seem small and sad. Like people huddled on a shoreline in the rain, watching the ship pull away. And I feel the loneliness of both the man on the ship that is leaving and the woman on the shore, watching him go.
I’ve been writing about that feeling — trying to pin it down. The poem “Night Falls” is about that. So is the one “joy comes.” I was trying to capture not only how it feels but also all the ways that it feels. The grief again, the regret and separateness and anxiety; the growing panic that it won’t ever end — that the future is a foreclosed thing, closed off on all sides by night, falling.
I don’t know how well I pulled that off. You can be the judge. But that’s what I was going for.
And yet, this blog is called “Before Sleep,” isn’t it? And the tagline, which is from Psalm 16, is “In the night also my heart instructs me.” So, I mean, why did a person who hates the night set up a whole blog about it?
To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. But I was thinking about it this afternoon, when I took the dogs for a walk in a local park.
(By the way, if it’s getting tedious to read, over and over again that I had an idea while walking the dogs, I’m truly sorry. I just don’t have that exciting of a life, and Pete insists on a daily walk, and, for better or for worse, when walking, I get ideas).
So I was walking the dogs and thinking about the poems from last week and how hard I had wrestled with night time, and thinking about the blog and why on earth I’d called it “Before Sleep,” and the tagline kept repeating in my mind, “In the night also my heart instructs me.”
“Instructs me how?” I thought. “How is this daily depression instructive?” I wasn’t even mad about it. Not demanding an answer. I just wanted to know.
So when I got home I read the Psalm again. It didn’t illuminate things particularly. Triggered no epiphanies. But still, as I went about the remainder of the day, ran on the treadmill, cleaned the stove, remembered to change the laundry, those words were in my mind. In the night also my heart instructs me.
And here’s what I thought, at last, when I was measuring out the coffee, setting it to brew for tomorrow morning: I thought that in the night time, my heart is exposed — open to the night air, to that vast expanse of space that is hidden all day by clouds and blue sky, that reveals itself at night, a million million stars burning all those millions of millions of miles away. All that nothingness.
I am aware at night of how easy it is to be alone, and of how alone it is possible to be.
And thus I am aware, at night, as I cannot be in the day time, of the insufficiency of myself; of the greatness of my need.
“In the night also my heart instructs me.” In the night, my heart says, “You can’t do it all yourself. The world’s too big and you’re so very small,” and if I leave it there, well. Night falls.
But it occurred to me tonight, that perhaps that feeling, unpleasant as it is, is the instruction.
“Of course you can’t. For goodness sake. I need you to know that. When morning comes, please don’t try. Remember that I am here and there are people out there, and you need us, both.” People out there. As many as the stars, which, when I remember that, seem closer.
(P.S. sorry the title’s wrong on the audio. This is what happens when I try to do things at night.)
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