These are the days when we need to rest

On the need for deep sleep

I have a favourite fantasy, and it goes like this:

I have endless time.

(That is basically it, although there’s more...)

I have endless time, so I have an immaculate home. There’s a desk just ready for me. There’s a studio with an easel and a dozen fat, vibrant paints waiting for me to spread thickly with a palette knife across a stretched canvas.

I have a garden full of peonies and roses, neat and fragrant and colourful. A little reading nook with a hammock, lemon trees and neon cushions. A hot espresso and a dainty madeleine dusted with icing sugar.

All is quiet. All is still.

There’s a little boating lake and when I’m tired, I climb into a boat filled with blankets and wrap them around me. Above, the treetops shake with warm breezes but I’m down here, warm, snug and stress-free. I’m happy. I drift off to sleep in the boat, floating around the little lake. Later, I might sit with a mint tea and read some poetry. The sun will be warm. I’ll dance if I feel like it.

There’s nobody who needs me. There’s nowhere else to be.

That’s my fantasy.

If I was that person, I wouldn’t have to wash swimming kits, or take cat-caught mice back outside with a dustpan and brush and leave them under a bush to take their chances. I wouldn’t have to do the food shopping at Aldi on a Friday night or use my lunch hour to buy more grey tights in Age 6-7 or book a smear test.

And yet -

… and yet -

For every time I’ve had to break off from my painting or piano playing or writing to agree that Misty is a splendid name for a guinea pig, there’s a moment cuddling under a shared blanket. For every time I let the neighbour’s boisterous dog out during my lunch hour, there’s a daft grin on its glorious face.

Whenever I spend half an hour pairing socks or tidying or doing housework, there is a plot point that suddenly illuminates itself, or an unexpected moment of loveliness, or a sense that, you know, while things can be tough, an orderly house is still better for creativity than untidiness.

I’ve always been someone who needs a lot of sleep. While for some hardy types January is a time for new starts, resolutions and restriction, I’ve learned for me that during the dark days of the year, beasting it in the gym and dieting is a fast track to feeling depressed.

January is a time for lots and lots of rest. When the return to work comes, it’s always jarring, so I go back in early January and seize the bull by the horns, feeling energised about a new set of books to work on. But my energy and focus goes on work and I funnel it wholeheartedly, relaxing for the rest of the time. The evenings are for early nights and reading and long, magnesium filled baths. There is always lots of soup. There are long walks.

We have a ‘do-nothing’ weekend, where we ideally stay close to home and make no plans. If there’s a choice between effort and ease, I take the easier route.

I’m not yet ready in January for the all-jets-powered forward thrust of activity. It will come. I don’t want to join exercise classes or go to night school or go shopping in the sales. I want to be warm and eat chocolate and take walks when the rain stops. I want to notice lighter evenings and sleep well and read my books. I want to remember the joy of seeing the children in my family open the presents I chose for them. My husband is still slicing lace-thin pieces of my Mum’s Christmas cake so he can eke it out until he is confident he can persuade her to bake him a simnel cake for Easter this year. He brews beer, the scents of malt and hops filling the house.

These are quiet days. My home, is a place almost free of external demands.

Like my fantasy, this is the closest I will get to having endless time, and yet I feel so tired that I need to sleep throughout it. I don’t have endless hours to create, because the dark days are so draining that I feel I could sleep 10 hours and repeat it the next night and the night after. Rest comes first.

By the end of January the shoots of the neighbour’s magnolia tree are beginning to push through. I might sit outside for a coffee with the weak sun on my face, in this garden where come summer there will be children and a paddling pool and barbecues. But for now it’s just me and a few goldfinches.

If there was endless time, I would, I’m sure, eventually create something, but for now, warmth and dark are the twin pillars of January.

With February comes focus, but for now, there is rest.

Can you do less too?