It’s Ok to Be Tired

I woke up this morning feeling like I should go to bed. I hadn’t gotten out of bed yet.

When I ‘came to’, I realized I’d been searching all over the place for why. Why am I so tired? The day hasn’t even begun. Trying to come up with something good enough to justify feeling so fatigued. Something virtuous enough.

I cam up empty, so I started horriblizing. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I’m dying of some slow-moving incurable disease.” This always makes me laugh when I catch myself at it because I’ve been doing this since I was, like, eight.

Next, I strategize. I think, “Well I’ve been eating an awful lot of gluten lately, and sugar, and that can make you feel sluggish…” yada yada. I make plans to stop all unhealthy eating. It begins in force, tomorrow. For sure.

Here’s a radical thought. What if I could experience this fatigue as just one of the many colors on my palette? What if I could know it nonjudgmentally — kind of like an extraterrestrial might, who’d been dropped into a human body just for a time as an experiment.

If I had no associations with what I identify as ‘fatigue’, negative or positive, how would it be with me this morning, lying in bed?

I feel an almost pleasant sense of density, of weight. Gravity causing the world to hug me to itself. My mind moves…