There’s a first time for everything: I got out of bed in the middle of the night to write an entry in this blog. I’ve considered it a few times in the past, but never actually done it before.
I just arrived in Germany yesterday, and I was hoping to conquer jetlag with the usual method of staying up late without any napping in order to sleep soundly through the first night. Maybe having nodded off on the train is the culprit, but I woke up at 3am and could not go back to sleep.
Last night after dinner I was eventually ready to fall asleep standing up. I enjoy conversing with my brother and sister-in-law, but it is obvious now that my brain was mostly storing rather than processing at the end of the evening. A trip to the bathroom was enough time for it to completely wake up, and at that point it was a total avalanche of thoughts!
You know how sometimes in the evening you cannot fall asleep because something is stuck in your thoughts and won’t go away? It was sort of like that, but different, because after each thought there was a new one pushing its way through. And there was no end to it — conversations from yesterday; tasks to tackle once I arrive in Finland; that it’s really a fact I’m not living in the USA anymore; and so on.
Finally at 4:30am I gave up and thought it would be better to actually focus on something. So much easier than a constant merry-go-round of random thoughts in your head.