The Circle Game

I was watching Springsteen on Broadway last night, (Neflix) which is a pretty incredible one-man sort of show in which he goes through his whole life in story and songs.

I really loved this for a couple of reasons. One is that his life story is really interesting. And kind of a walkabout that brought him right back to the place where he was actually from.

I saw the parallels there, between his life and mine. Not that I am a rich rock and roll songwriter, performer and legend. But that I left the place where I was raised, the Niagara Peninsula, at the age of 18 and now, more that fifty years later, I find myself right back here and happy about the decision to return.

The second reason was that Bruce’s story got me thinking about my own. And for some strange reason I woke up this morning with this strange a-ha insight.

Getting To Sleep

For most of my adult life, I have always slept well. The big issue I have always had had more to do with the rhythms of the sleep/wake cycle.

This morning, in the few moments of clarity you get before the day starts crowding in on you, it occurred to me, in a kind of blinding flash of insight, that the days when I wake up feeling like I could really kick some ass, are the days when when, for whatever reason, I got in sync with my natural sleep/wake rhythm

In this insight I realized that I would always have trouble getting to sleep because I simply was not in this rhythm. I was either going to bed too early or too late. Or I wasn’t writing for a couple hours before going to bed to divest myself of the considerable angst that builds up with each day and the bullshit the world throws at you. And we all know how much of that there is to deal with these days.

But this morning it all became clear. It wasn’t so much that I was a slave to these rhythms, but that I had somehow chosen them early on and then had them altered by all the responsibilities of having a career as an advertising professional, raising a family, doing a ton of freelance and hobby writing and all the other stuff of life.

And now that those responsibilities have lessened, I realized that my body and mind were telling me that it’s time to go back, as much as possible, to those original rhythms, and that I will be happier and more productive that way.

Hence the title of this post.

I don’t know if any of you feel the same way about this as I do. Things like this are very personal. So I am just happy that I was able to stumble across this insight. Because, for me at least, it feels like the last hurdle I had to jump in this new phase of my existence back home again.

Hopefully, it will give me back a lot of the energy I felt I was losing which, in turn, will make me more productive and allow me to keep on doing the things I love to do for longer.

Thanks, Bruce....I needed that.

jim out