Primitive

I admit it. I have a bit of brain fog this morning. It’s a combination of long days and vino, or whiskey, or beer. Take your pick. And standing, and sitting, and listening to music. And I think there’s a bit of the aging brain trying to process all of it, especially the chatter of lots of voices. I had to take a break and seek out some silence yesterday. Found it.

Now I’m up and back at it with not nearly enough sleep. And that means I need to take special care that all the controls are in place and that the patience of sleep is not worn too thin. Because the beast is always there right beneath the skin ready to take offense, warn of danger, fight to survive, hurt the ones you love. This is where the cognitive brain needs to step up and work a little harder to keep the animal side under control because the latter acts without thinking and it’s leash will be short today.

I’ve always wondered how soldiers do it. Survive on little sleep. But they do it, and that’s where training comes in, and most of us aren’t trained to work on little sleep because mostly it involves just living, and we get surprisingly little training in that. We just do it and try to learn from our mistakes. Sometimes. Because it’s really easy not to care, but just go and let the chips fall where they may. And for me, today, I think I’ll just try to keep my mouth shut and soak in the music and the beauty of the countryside and the company of friends and remember how lucky I am to be where I am doing what I’m doing.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale