I have no particular idea of what I want to talk about, so it’s time to just open a vein and let it flow.

Today was a very sleepy day. I slept from 3 am to 11 am, had lunch at noon, then slept from 12:30 pm to 4 pm. That’s like… almost 12 hours of sleep. Half a day. And I still feel sort of tired.

There might be nothing wrong with that. That’s what I am trying to teach myself. Maybe the only problem is that I can’t simply accept that maybe that is what my mind and body needs, and if I stop fighting myself over it, everything will simply sort itself out.

Nietzsche was described as a man constantly at war with himself, using drugs and diet to try to fight the illnesses which plague him, and he lived many years as a profoundly sick and weakly person because of it.

I learned that lesson as part of learning to control my Irritable Bowel Syndrome. You can’t win against IBS if you tackle it head first and try to wrestle it into submission. That only adds energy to the system and you end up feeling a hell of a lot worse. That’s not a battle you can win.

You have to take the opposite approach, and let things run their course. And learn to listen to your body. It will tell you when things are going awry, and only then do you have the chance to head trouble off at the pass and keep yourself out of agony.

I suppose it’s a form of serenity. If I were a more aggressive person by nature, I am sure my road to recovery would have been far rockier. But I eventually (it took around four years) learned not to freak out when I started to feel ill, and when the bad stuff came down, to just relax and ride it out.

Maybe that is how I should look at sleep too. There’s no point in being upset about sleeping a lot. Maybe I need that extra sleep time to catch up on my dreaming. Maybe my body needs that extra sleeping time to clean house after all the naughty foods I ate over Xmas made a mess of the place. Maybe the very process of recovery means that sometimes, I have to sleep a lot in order to give my mind the time to process some of the deep hurt that lies within my tortured psyche and thus disentangle my knotted mind a little further.

I am just full of metaphors tonight. Hope you nice people are keeping up.

I keep coming back to the idea that one should live one’s life like an old time sailor. A sailor does not control the winds or the waves or a tide. He only controls his sails and his rudder. And yet, the boat gets where it wants to go.

So by just exerting the amount of control he has at his command, the sailor can triumph. The sailor knows that by adjusting to the circumstances beyond his control, he can prevail. Even if the storms come and knock his boat way off course and it looks like this might just be the end, he knows that if he can weather the storm, he will be able to get right back on course when it’s over.

It’s a very deep metaphor for life, I think. If I do say so myself. You don’t control the world. You don’t control what life throws at you. You don’t control your final destiny.

All you can do is steer.

But as it is when we drive, steering is enough to get us where we want to go.

Think about it. No driver controls the roads or the traffic. At any moment, any driver might have to adjust to sudden changes in circumstances. Even in city traffic, most of the time drivers have no choice what to do between intersections. Get on the highway and you have even fewer choices.

And yet billions of people get where they want to go every second of every day with those limited choices.

So life is a lot less like the individualistic ideal of self-made destiny and a lot more like a series of choices. You can’t always control the choices you have. But you always control what decisions you make.

But I am repeating myself. You get the general idea.

Other than sleepiness, today has been fine. Quiet and calm, like usual. That;s both the way I like and the way I really, really don’t. I look forward to the new semester, when my life will feel purposeful again.

I am really concentrating on my two word New Year’s resolution : stay busy! I am going to teach myself to develop little projects and goals until I am in a position where I have always something to do. That doesn’t mean I have to be a non stop dynamo of productivity. It just means that I have to look for ways to express the energy within myself until I am comfortably spent.

And that means clearing my mind of a lot of counterproductive ideas and poisonous fears. I have to stop listening to the part of me that always wants to run and hide from the world, and treats absolutely any increase in “exposure” to the world to be terrifying insanity.

Hiding is not safety, it’s death. The demons inside me are far deadlier than the terrors without. They just fool me into siding with them because they are so familiar.

And in that new semester, I am going to have Thursdays and Fridays off, and I will have to deal with that. Last semester, I had a class every day of the week. Spiffy. But I am not so lucky this time.

So I will have an extra two days a week to fill with… something. Video games and the Internet are not enough to keep my soul alive. I need more.

I need to stay busy!

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.