In The Middle of The Night, We're Perfectly Okay

Image by author

When I wake in the middle of the night, I hear the rain battering the windows and my wherewithal. Where am I?

I’m awake in the wild of the night — in the shelter of my well-constructed house — when the gaping hole in my egoism, which I can never see in daylight, opens wide, and there it is, my questionable existence. Will I survive death? What is this all about? What if Neptune never heard of me?

It hasn’t.

When I wake in the middle of the night, the first thing is always a feeling — utter solitude and sad disconnect, like George Clooney floating off into space in Gravity, viciously alone. It’s a counterintuition. I should be asleep, and in sleep, I’d be connected to the sleeping world. To be awake at that hour is to be let go on the side of a dark desert road where nothing lives.

Life makes no sense in that first waking moment at 3 in the morning. Or, worse, it’s clearly about dismay.

I wonder if I’ve done the right things, if I acted well, if I made a mark on those around me that will be their bookmark for me. Do you remember Stephanie?

I begin to wonder if I belong.

Then, over some minutes, after the rain becomes less a commotion and more a regular drumbeat, I adjust to this waking and start to make friends with the middle of the night. It’s 3:00 am and me — two peas in a pod, though the pod is meant for the deep night, and I am its intruder. I don’t fit into a pod meant for time. I am a fleshy thing who is a complainer. An ingrate. But the night takes me into its fold anyway, cuddles me into a state of assurance so I can finally see that it’s not a foreign land or a prison of the most vacant dimensions, but my home, my very skin.

The middle of the night is a rare form of majesty that I can’t see while I’m irked at my misfortunes. Once I settle down, acceptance happens and my senses get extra curious. I can feel the rare freedom inherent in 3 am. All are welcome because no one competes at that hour. At the sleeping hour, the world stops, save for owls, and the drive to succeed has no meaning.

There is only being.

It doesn’t take long to adjust. At first, I lay there and feel this space — quiet (if my husband isn’t snoring), cozy, and with no external pressures to reason. I have time on my hands. So now what? If I don’t cave and reach straight for my phone, I lay there and feel the mattress and my breath. I begin to see my life from above. I can see a garden of goodness and the matter-of-factness of it all. I also see the question marks, what I don’t know, the holes.

If I start to try to answer those questions, I will never go back to sleep. My mind will spin in an energetic array of wanting to know things that can’t be known while lying in bed at 3 am in pajamas. The world can’t be solved in this attire, nor can I.

I will never be solved. I’m not an equation. I’m not meant to be solved.

I bargain with myself. “You can read for one hour and still get another two hours of sleep. You’ll walk away with six. Six is good.”

I assess risk. “If you don’t get back to sleep, four hours isn’t the worst. But it isn’t the best. You might be able to think on four hours of sleep. You just need to be able to think.”

I promote reading. “Read that book on emotion. You’re halfway through.”

I say this while trying not to emote. Impossible.

I ordered a new vibrating alarm a while back online. Once it arrived, I ripped open the box and flopped on my bed to test it out. It was so fancy compared to the piddly version I’d used for years. Go big, I said. Splurge.

I set the alarm for one minute into the future and lay there motionless, waiting. I closed my eyes, relaxed, and got still. Then, BAM! A catastrophic explosion! A violence unimaginable!

The vibrating alarm not only shook me into devastation but blared louder than a siren inside my ear. It was so severe that I thought the alarm must be some fringe device manufactured in a dark alley. Surely, nobody ever needed something like this to wake them up! This can’t be an actual, legitimate invention.

But when I searched online, all I found were reviews from folks that said, “Meh — sometimes I slept right through it.”

Did I get swapped with my twin from another dimension without knowing it? How could the world be like this? Some people sleep so soundly while others are on a first-name basis with 3 am? Is this how it is?

This is how it is.

Yet, as much as it’s best to sleep through the night, there is one benefit you won’t get if you do. In the quiet of the night, when all the diurnal creatures are in airplane mode, you have special access to a closely held secret of the Universe: the dead of night is alive, and I don’t mean with the nocturnal crowd, but yes, those owls are partying it up.

I discovered this when I ran long distances, when sometimes my friends and I ran through the night. I’d wind my way through the mountain trails, my headlamp illuminating a slice of the sleeping world, and it didn’t take long to notice a unique space in me that lives under the daytime radar but is available when it’s just me in an empty context. While this space is what surrounds me physically — the dark mountain trail — it’s also a mental space of a safe baseline, without an up or down, a left or right, a yes or no. It’s a space of simple okayness.

When I wake in the middle of the night, this space is available, too. It doesn’t take much time spent there to see my simple self, the one unattached to the vibrant cycle of life’s clamoring asks. It seems to happen almost in an instant. If I’m simply okay, then my life is perfectly okay. It’s the nirvana of night.

It’s funny how the light of the sun can make us think the day is a different creature than the night. We’re still the same planet spinning in a pitch-black universe, but when we face the sun, we can’t see that — we’re duped.

We’re the same creature, too. At night we’re perfectly okay, but come daytime, the sunlight doesn’t obliterate that. It might distract us from it. It might camouflage it. But having simple okayness at night isn’t a 12-hour thing. This extends for the whole day, the year, and our lives. We were born this way — perfectly okay. I’m not trying to be poetic or deep here. It’s pure logic. The universe exists in okayness. Only in our imaginations did we invent the opposite.

If the middle of the night helps us to see this logic, then I’m a fan, a proponent. Hey, if you need help waking at three in the morning, hit me up. I have a barely used alarm clock I can loan you.

Nighty night.

---

Hope you're well, friends.