It was either my junior or senior year in high school. I vividly remember walking up the path to the main entrance of the school in animated conversation with a few friends of mine. Animated conversation was one of my primary forms of communication during my high school years. The topic of the conversation could have been anything from sports to politics to existential philosophy, but on this particular day the topic was my sleep patterns.
I was coming off a weekend retreat with my camp community where I got little to no sleep and was preparing to have very little time to sleep in the coming week because of the rehearsal schedule for the school play. I was trying to convince my friends that I would be fine without the sleep because I had spent the two weekends prior filling my body with rest and had built up a reserve that would get me through the stretch run. My friends were having none of it. “That isn’t how sleep works”, they yelled. “It’s how it works for me” was my response.
I think one of the more frustrating aspects of arguing with me at that time in my life was that my primary interest in many of our conversations was not coming to a universal or even consensus understanding of the topic, rather my aim was building an articulable understanding of how I worked.
I knew that there was a kernel of truth in the story I was telling about my biorhythms. I could tell in some way that I was not built for repetitive energetic output that occurred on a regular basis. I knew at the core of my being that the rhythms of school with its daily schedule that followed the same rhythms over the course of ten months with very few interruptions was not harmonious with my way of being. I knew and was building a mountain of evidence that productions that required high energy output over short periods of time were much more in line with the way my body preferred to operate. I thrived in the rhythm of the school plays, the summer camp I worked at, and even intensive class projects in ways that I never could in the long and drawn out rhythm of the conventional school year.
This developing understanding of myself, which I was in no way able to articulate at the time, was the context in which I argued about building up my sleep reserve. In the end I don’t think we ever came to a resolution of that argument. It is likely that the bell rang and we had to walk into class. But the moment, the feeling in my body, stayed with me. As frustrating as I must have been to argue with, it was also frustrating for me that my friends wouldn’t believe a truth that was coming from my own body. Their arguments were all coming from things that we had learned about sleep. My argument was coming from my own lived experience. The frustrating thing for me in those moments was that my lived experience about who I was and how my body worked was not believed, was not being taken seriously.
Eventually I stopped arguing so much, I stopped trying to convey these truths about me. I did not stop trying to understand myself, I did not stop listening to what my body was telling me, but I did stop inviting others into that conversation. And perhaps, by not sharing it, by not speaking openly about it, there was a part of me that stopped being so sure of the truths that my body held, a part of me that began measuring myself against what conventional wisdom said was supposed to be instead of measuring myself against what my body knew to be true.
There is a classic Jewish story that has helped me remember to listen to my body in those moments. The story is of a Rabbi called Zusya. When facing death Rabbi Zusya said he was not worried that in the coming world they would ask him why he was not like Moses or Abraham or any of the other great leaders from our people’s stories. The only question he was worried he would have to answer was why he was not more like Zusya. He knew that he was not meant to be measured against the achievements or ways of being of these other people, that the only measure he would be held to was his own truth. And so he lived his life not trying to be like any of the heroes that he learned about, but trying only to be like he knew himself to be. He lived his life in harmony with what he understood to be his true nature.
For the last two days I have wanted to do nothing but sleep. More accurate would be to say that my body has insisted that I do nothing but sleep. My mind had all kinds of ideas of things I wanted to do - bike rides I wanted to take, essays I wanted to write. But my body knew that it needed rest, not only because of the energy that I have expended in this last week, but also because of the energy I am getting ready to expend.
At first I tried to fight my body on this. I tried to get myself up and force myself to bike and write, and do other things that are understood to be “productive”. But when I tried there was a resounding discordance in my body. I could tell right away that I was not in harmony with a truth that my body knew.
My body knew that I needed rest. It knew that I am about to enter a busy stretch. It knows the rhythms of my life, knows when a lot of energy is going to be needed, and knows that when there is an opportunity to get some rest, to store up some sleep, it is not going to let me miss that opportunity. It turns out that all those years ago I was right about my sleep patterns.