ON STAYING AWAKE

BY DR. GEORGE BIRTCH

Sometimes we worry because we stay awake at night. We might also worry because we do NOT stay awake in the daytime.

On the road to health it may well be that insomnia is less a peril than somnambulism. It is not just those who lie down who go to sleep. It is easy to go to sleep intellectually. As little children we were curious about things. We kept asking why? Why? Why?

As we grow older pride often prevents us from admitting ignorance. We pretend we know. Or we are not interested any more. We do not care to know. And so our minds go to sleep in a world where there is so much to learn and discover.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was in his eighties when he started to study Greek. A friend asked him why at his age he should do that. Of what possible use could it be? Holmes' answer was simply. "I want to know Greek".

We are not as old as the calendar says. We are as old as our intellectual curiosity. No one is old who is still learning, growing, exploring. No one is young who has stopped doing that.

We worry lest we not have enough years left to live out our life. We should worry lest we have not enough life left to live out our years.

It is easy to go to sleep in self-discipline. There are many failures in recovery, not because the person does not want to recover, but because he is unwilling to accept the discipline required to change from one habit pattern to another.

A sign on a frozen mud road in Northern Ontario used to read, "Be careful which rut you choose. You will be in it for the next forty five miles." Good living habits do not just happen. As they say in the self-help group called Recovery, Inc., you have to "command your muscles".

Stern self-discipline is required to get a healthy habit pattern firmly fixed. Will power is not as old fashioned as is often supposed. It is easy to allow social consciouness to go to sleep. Cocoons are comfortable. We can weave a silky shell around ourselves and become quite unaware of "how the other half lives".

One man, prominent in business circles, claimed that for him one of the great benefits of being in Donwood was that he got to know intimately men and women vastly different from himself in living standard and education. He got to know them as human beings, and became their friends.

"Normally" he said, "I live and work with people who all talk the same way, think the same way, have the same values and goals. This experience has shaken me out of my cosy little nest".

We live in a world of radical change and tremendous challenge. Yet many pretend it "business as usual" When Rip Van Winkle went to sleep the picture on the sign on the inn was of George III. When he woke up it was the picture of George Washington. He had slept through a revolution!

Health is not simply an absence of physical distress. Health is being awake mentally. It is living a controlled and balanced life. It is being alert to the limitations and handicaps and deprivations of many people around us, and being awake enought to do something about it.

Don says: Soak this one in, it is deep. Copy this and post it on your bathroom mirror so you can see it at the beginning of each day.