For much of my life, if doctors had analyzed my brain waves, I’m pretty sure they would have determined I was asleep. My body may have been going through the motions of being awake, but for an embarrassingly long number of years, my brain was slumbering.

I snoozed my way through jobs, vacations, opportunities, even love affairs. Wandering around in a somnambulistic daze, just letting life happen and just reacting, rarely acting.

And while I don’t regret my life, I do regret the minimalist approach I had to living much of it.

Then, one day, after a calamitous event – an event that knocked me so hard on my butt I thought I’d never be able to get back up again – I woke up.

And once I woke up, it took me a while, but I finally got back on my feet. And once I was standing, I vowed I’d never get knocked down again. And for that, I had to stay awake.

Because one thing I’d learned was that when you’re sleep-walking through life, even the smallest of hits, the lightest of blows, can knock you down for the count.

When you’re drowsing your way through life you really don’t pay attention to the red flags: your boyfriend lied about a few things but they were small, so no biggie; a good friend seemed unusually irritated with you, but you assume she’d talk with you if something was really wrong; you used up your savings to go on that vacation last year and haven’t built it back up yet again.

And while you’re doing the narcoleptic shuffle, you find out your lying boyfriend is also cheating on you; your good friend has stopped calling altogether; and when your car breaks down, your savings account isn’t enough to take care of the mechanic’s bill. You feel blindsided — but only because you weren’t paying attention to the signs.

With all that’s going on in the world right now – the pandemic, the crazy-making controversy over the simple health practice of wearing a mask, the social unrest, the chaos in our government … combined with isolation for so many, especially our elders. It’s all enough to make me sleepy again.

It’d be so much easier to doze-coast through the chaos, wouldn’t it? And, so many of us are so tired. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to dim the lights, turn up the volume on whatever we’re binge-watching, uncork another bottle of wine, and tune out of watching reliable news sources or reading newspapers or historical literature. Can’t we just set the alarm to wake us up when it’s happy-times-are-here-again-hour?

Unfortunately, when we sleep-walk as individuals, we sleep-walk as a country. No man is an island, right?

And besides, as attractive as it might sound right now to pull the blankets up over my head and hunker down for a good, long snooze, honestly, you couldn’t pay me to go back to my shut-eye ways again. I like being awake at the wheel, even when I’m bone-tired of driving.

Where are you sleep-walking through your life?

Where are you closing your eyes to what matters?

What inner voice — or exterior voices — are you refusing to listen to?

How are you silencing your own voice or quashing — invalidating — your true feelings about someone or something?

Take some time to look at your life and examine it for areas where you might be sleep-walking or even dozing at the wheel, and make adjustments NOW to wake up!

It’s a heckuva lot easier to wake yourself up from your slumber on your own terms than to allow external circumstances or people to wake you up on their terms. That, my friends, can be a true waking nightmare.

And even if nothing super calamitous happens, you don’t want to get to the middle or end of your life and find you were only half-awake for most of it, do you?

If you want help exploring your waking (or sleeping!) life, give me a shout.

Stay well. Be safe.

MC