Resting Under The Stars
#ayearofnightskies
It should be that resting is the easiest thing to do. To simply put up the shutters and do the bare minimum of daily functions. To breathe, eat, digest, to simply exist. But for me, it has been one of the hardest things I have ever done.
When I was seriously ill a few years ago, all I could do was sleep. Large portions of each day where the unconscious mind took over and I slept and slept and slept. Only being woken for the daily necessities – the true functions of survival. Days merged and a sense of time passing was lost. The regular rhythms of the day had entirely gone from my existence. Looking back, I cannot grasp how long this was for, I think maybe a few days, at a push a week. Those closest to me say it dragged on for weeks and into months as my body tried to fight a Covid infection.
At some point came a transition into being able to do a bit more, sit up in bed, listen to a podcast or the radio. Short bursts of attention, forgetting what I had heard within in minutes of starting to listen. Making decisions was exhausting. Trying anything other than the most cursory of communication was simply beyond comprehension. Replying to text messages seemed particularly onerous, stumbling over both the physicality of typing and how to structure words together to form anything coherent.
Looking back, there are then points in my recovery when I could start to do more.
My first trip downstairs in several months, cautiously navigating each stair sitting down as I edged my way step by step downwards as a toddler would. Coming into a room, bright with overhead lights and a television blaring. The combination of sound and bright visuals causing me to feel complete overwhelm and making a retreat, slowly crawling back up the stairs.
There is a memory from a few months later of being stuck on the stairs, of being home alone. Of coming downstairs but leaving my phone upstairs. Of trying to get back up the stairs and exhaustion being so utterly consuming and being sat on the stairs, no energy to go up or down. In the words of the old nursery rhyme being stuck halfway was neither up nor down but for me a strange hinterland.
Navigating these transitions was a fine balance between doing more and not doing so much that my recovery crashed back down again. I’ve had to learn to underestimate what I can do. It’s feels counter intuitive to years of being urged to reach for the stars, to find instead that you can only reach that little bit higher above your head. But I’ve gained the confidence that if I do reach from my safety zone, just go that smallest bit further. Then you can inch forward.
Those small increments add up, I’ve just needed to adjust my perception of what recovery looks like. All the time while it feels you are just surviving; it is only when you take a long view backwards that any progress can be seen. This progress can feel so trivial when reflecting back. From being able to get out of bed unaided; to feeling a growing steadiness when walking.
At some point, existing becomes more than surviving. As energy increased, I was able to embrace a mindset of getting better, rather than being ill. This was a big switch, changing the language of myself to embrace the future. A future where exhaustion did not reign, and activity was welcome. The pace of time for recovery is not day by day but rather week by week or at times season by season. Real progress is measured in months as you watch your life slip past you. Learning to celebrate the smallest of triumphs becomes paramount of importance.
To properly rest involves not just the body, but mind and spirit as well. To find a calmness within. Mediation and mindfulness might bring this for some short periods but without becoming a Buddhist monk, a life lived in almost mediation doesn’t seem feasible. So, it’s learning what can help to induce rest. To reduce the stress out of life. To set clear boundaries to family and friends. To restrict those who are toxic to your recovery from your life and instead to find joy. To embrace joy as it is the sheer essence of your being. To find it in a raindrop on a leaf; a lonely cloud in a blue sky; the smile of a friend; a postcard through the door. It is these small daily pockets of joy that shape our existence, that make us human.
Recovery for me has been slow and painful. The mental isolation can be brutal, and I’ve learnt to lean into the positive people. Taking radical action to distance myself from those things that trigger fear. To learn how to reclassify what feels like anxiety as excitement.
At several times I wished I’d lived a century or so ago. An era that if I was lucky to be of the middle classes I could have been packed off to stay with a maiden aunt in some seaside town. It is the sea I’ve missed the most, it calls to me at times. I hear the waves in my dreams. It’s the biggest disadvantage of living so far inland, that loss of connection to the ebb and flow of waves. As moving to the sea is not an option, I look for another way to connect.
The sleep gurus tell us that we should seek daylight as soon as we wake up. That early exposure to sunlight resets our body rhythms. As I get more mobile around the house and spend a more normal division between the upstairs and downstairs. Going upstairs to bed has become a normal end to each day. I started to go outside and look at the night sky before bed. Our ancestors would have been daily attuned not just to the sunrise but also to the sunset and then the coming of the night sky, of the patterns of the stars and moon as they transit overhead.
For many of us, living in boxes, in towns with streetlights glowing we miss this transition to the night sky. Absorbed at times by the beauty of a sunset, we take little notice of the darkness that follows. This darkness seems to be at best tolerated, and at worst a nuisance as we switch on the lights. We use these lights to navigate – headlights on our cars, streetlights in public spaces and security lights at home. I wonder how often we ever immerse ourselves in the darkness now.
Each night as I go to bed, I go outside and look up to the sky, on cold evenings I wrap a blanket around me, or put up a brolly if it is raining. It is a momentary look up. No time spent to identify constellations but instead making a connection to that what is beyond our planet. Over this year I’ve also taken a photograph of the sky. It has cemented this practice. A ritual that puts the day to bed. Its significance is a connection to those days, weeks, and months that were lost to me. Where the passing of each day was a mush in my cognition. There was no outside world, no daytime or night-time, just moments grasped and then forgotten.
The image I take each night, is a way of reaching out into time and space. A way of solidifying this day, every day. I don’t have a strict methodology, so the images vary in angle of view and time, but they are taken just before I go to bed. For me, no single image stands out. However, when viewed as a gallery, a year long typology, they mass together into something so much greater than any individual image can offer.
A reminder of the duality of both my insignificance as a single human and also of my connectedness to everything else, every atom that is out there.
A reminder to me, that it is night-time, time to sleep and dream and wake up tomorrow.
From 21st December 2022 to December 20th 2023 I took a photograph of the night sky just before I went to bed, wherever I was. To see the gallery of images visit:
This post was originally published in the Reasons To Be Cheerful Annual in December 2023.
Excellent writing. Really powerful.