Hollowed-Out Night

I crash when I retire for the night, after about one page of whichever book from the pile came to hand.    And that's great.  And like most of the rest of the human race, I do not spring out of bed in the morning, I crawl out, and do not really wake up until I'm outside with the dog.

But sandwiched in between, every night, somewhere, for some minutes or hours, I'm awake.  And I used to say, "I do my best thinking" when I wake up in the middle of the night.  Until a few years ago, when a very wise partner of mine said, "Strange.  Most of the thinking I do in then is dumb, way off base, and useless in the morning."

I think she was half right.  I now think of the litany of to-dos, fantasies, and mild obsessions as a list:  things that are bothering me, and need to be addressed.  It's not the list, it's the solutions that come to me in the darkness, that are usually useless.

The name of this entry, "Hollowed-Out Night", came to me last night in that middle period.  I don't think it fits what I'm saying here, by day, but I'm keeping it.  Maybe there was more, and I can't remember.  And maybe it was dumb.