Tired

Only now am I beginning to realize how tired I am. It is Chanukah vacation and there is no school until Thursday so instead of setting my alarm as usual I've been letting my body rest as long as it wants. Today I did not wake up until late morning, after eleven and a half hours of sleep.

To some extent this might still be the result of last week's massive ear infection. Also, though, I think it is related to the fact that I have not really slept since I was 29 years old. For a variety of reasons I stopped sleeping with any regularity or at any significant length about four years ago, instead staying up late doing any number of projects to make myself exhausted enough to actually fall asleep when I would finally get into bed instead of lying there, body still but mind racing. I've always been an involuntary morning person--not my personal nature but instead a necessity of my profession, since school begins very early in the day--and so finally collapsing into bed sometime between one and two a.m., then getting up at quarter to six, comes out to something like one night of sleep for every two days if even that.

Then there was the very long period of time when my relationship with someone halfway around the world kept me up late, or was it early, on the phone doing what I could to maintain whatever connection is possible when people are 7,500 miles apart. And let me not forget the brief period of time I dated a world-class triathlete, during which significant free-choice time was spent running, cycling, and swimming--by turns exhilarating and exhausting.

So the combination of insomnia and elementary school, of projects and transatlantic phone calls and the ongoing quest for extreme physical fitness, means I've been sleeping between four and five hours a night for the past four years. It wears on you after awhile, weakening your immune system to the point that you get sick more often and take longer to get well, and leaving you at times in a semi-perpetual state of such psychological and emotional delirium that it is difficult to concentrate on anything or anyone, including yourself. That, I can see now, is one of the many reasons I did it for so long. That and the fear of getting into bed in the dark and often chilly San Francisco night and not being able to sleep, lying instead restless and convinced that everyone everywhere else in the entire city was dreaming sweetly while I alone was listening to the N-Judah rumble by outside. It did not help that I had a late-night partner in crime, a dear friend of mine who for her own reasons also never slept and with whom I very much took advantage of my Cingular Wireless unlimited night and weekend minutes. It was always interesting when my cell phone bill would come to see how long she and I had actually been talking on any given night: 47 minutes, 123 minutes, 215 minutes...about what? Anything, nothing. It was conversation, yes, but also collaboration, a partnership of two people afraid to go to bed out of fear of what might be waiting there for them.

I began to sleep a bit this summer at camp and it was a gift the likes of which I could not describe. In the mountains of Yosemite, it gets very dark very early even in the longest days of summer. Once dinner and song session are over and the sun sets, once my nightly block of Jewish bedtime folktales was over and I had showered in the always-empty bathroom by Boys' Side Field, not much was left besides staff bedtime snack at 10 and whatever conversation comes along with that each night. Plus, as the camp's only Jewish educator, I was working hard teaching units how to prepare for Kabbalat Shabbat and leading bunks down to the river for midday trips to the mikveh, I was busy making challah with 150 campers every Friday and leading services from morning Torah to evening Havdallah every Saturday.

For the first time since I turned 30 I was tired.

So I slept a bit those ten weeks but then when I moved back to Berkeley that ended almost immediately--I was home and with friends and by a television for the first time in nine years, I was packing and repacking and making endless lists of things to buy at Target in preparation for an eight month trip overseas. Oh, and we were all hard at work getting Mark and Rebecca married, after all. So the sleeping dropped off a bit during the fall.

Only now, nine weeks after I left California, am I finally allowing myself to feel tired...only now, four years later, am I beginning to sleep. I feel lazy and guilty for being so still, it is unfamiliar and uncomfortable after the past years of hyperkinesis. It is also challenging in light of all the "shoulds" (so helpful!) I am feeling about my life here these months: I am living in Jerusalem, so while it is vacation and I have time off from school I "should" go to museums, ride the bus to as-of-yet-unexplored parts of town, go to The Coffeeshop on Rehov Azza and at least sit in the window and drink a seven-shekel cappucino while writing in my journal or working on Rebecca's birthday card instead of sitting here in our library-slash-my bedroom. But you see, I am so very tired and it is just much too far to go...

Plus, I am still working as an English teacher and tutoring my own private students and doing some learning myself in night class twice a week. So it is not as if I never do anything, as if I always sleep. I have to try and consider that life and one's actions within it is not a dichotomy but a continuum, I have to reflect on the fact that the insane and unsustainable schedule and level of commitment I had made in every sphere of my life in San Francisco--professional, personal, social, relational, spiritural--is at the far left of the spectrum and that to move even just slightly right to a place where I have five to-do list items for a day instead of fifteen might be not only still acceptable but actually beneficial. So today I got up, ate breakfast, did laundry, washed dishes, took a shower and got dressed, read a book, had lunch, and wrote. After this I will go to the corner store. Later tonight I am going to dinner at the house of friends for Chanukah. And you know what? That just might be my day.

In her book _Eat, Pray, Love_, Elizabeth Gilbert writes this at the end of her decadent, indulgent, instructive, and very necessary four months in Italy:
But is it such a bad thing to live like this just for a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition that to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?