Oversleeping

Hey guys! I hope your new year is off to a great start so far. :)

Well, something interesting happened on Tuesday night. I was working on the book, trying to revise a little paragraph from the first chapter, but my mind was wandering all over the place. After a long time of just sitting at the laptop without typing any words something finally came to me, and it ended up becoming one of the pieces I'm most happy with in the whole book (all 2 chapters of it)! A thought about making decisions brought this on ...

- - -

The boy rolled over onto his back and within moments could feel himself drifting off into a light doze.

“Just five more minutes of sleep and I’ll be good to go … No, get up! You’ve got school!”

RJ silently argued with himself. His mind was telling him to get up and get ready for the long day, and his body was begging him to stay in bed and rest. Unfortunately for RJ, his mind was quickly overruled.

“Just five more minutes …”

Five became ten, ten became twenty, twenty became thirty, and still RJ was curled up beneath his covers with no idea that he had fallen back into a deep sleep.

- - -

When it comes to making a decision between something good and something bad, why is it that the good something is never easy? Why do we seem to always want to side with what we want rather than our instincts? It's like failing a class and taking it again, we've all been taught this lesson but do we ever really learn it?

Like RJ, I've developed my own little habit of oversleeping, and it's really getting on my nerves. I hear the alarm, I turn it off, I think about getting up, but I go back to sleep. I even put the alarm clock on the opposite side of the room so I'd have to move around a little more to turn it off, but still, I get back in bed and go back to sleep.

What's up with that?

I know I need to discipline myself to wake up on time, but it takes discipline to discipline, and that's tough, especially when there's a lot going on in our lives - obstacles making discipline even harder than usual. I have a 2 year old nephew, and he throws tantrums in the morning. A lot of the time when I turn my alarm off, I'll hear him screaming in the living room, and that will totally seal the going back to sleep deal.

In RJ's case, his body (even if he has no idea yet) is trying to fight of a killer disease and it's literally eating away his energy. Normally, he's one of those kids who hears the alarm and jumps out of bed, animated, and ready to go. Being tired was his obstacle, he sided with what he wanted rather than his instincts, and he certainly pays the price in the end. He misses the bus and has to ride his bike all the way to school in cold, winter temperatures, and snow.

The price for my oversleeping is that my day gets thrown out of whack. I get in trouble for sleeping in, and I end up having to rush to get stuff done. It's just not worth it! I've decided to take more measures to make sure I wake up when I'm supposed to, such as setting an extra alarm on my cell phone to go off 5 minutes before the alarm clock. I hate the idea ... But if that doesn't work, I'll set another, and another, and another, until I get it right.

When did I start enjoying sleep so much?

As for RJ ... I think his was actually a lesson he learned right away, because he really hates being outside in the cold at six forty-five in the morning. That's cool to think about though, that the result of his decision was bad enough to keep him from making it again. Maybe that's what some of us need when it comes to making decisions. A kick in the right direction, you know?

This was pretty much all of the thought process that came from writing that one little paragraph. I've never been much of a writer, but I'm enjoying it more and more and more simply for the freedom, and because I learn a lot from it.

Thanks for reading!