19 August 2023

Sleeping well


['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is 197th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below] 

After a hard fought political battle in an institution was lost, a soldier noticing the crestfallen faces of his comrades-at-arms smiled: ‘I always sleep well after a good fight, regardless of victory or defeat, because I know I have done my best.’  

That’s a good ‘sleeping tablet,’ then, isn’t it? Do your best, sleep well. A nice rule of thumb, a good mantra to remember.

On the other hand, consider this: around thirty years ago an observant young man said that no one in this world ever does anything wrong; they believe they are right! Therefore all battles are self-righteous and everyone can get a good night’s sleep on account of having fought the good fight well, to the best of ability and knowledge.

Here’s the problem: it is not everyday that we do battle. Sure, life’s a struggle and there are things to contend with every single day. There are knots to untie and knots to tie, some ropes are greasy and sometimes there’s too much sweat in the fingers and the hand can tremble. If one really wants, anything and everything can be defined as ‘a battle,’ except we don’t usually see it that way. The satisfaction of fighting the good fight as a precursor to a good night’s sleep is not obtained simply because we don’t think of things in fighting terms.

So how do we get a good night’s sleep on non-fighting days? I think the ‘I’ve done the best I could’ line might work. It doesn’t have to be a fight. It’s about surviving. Living. Being. Engagement.

How we make choices and how we act upon the choices made are informed by notions of right and wrong, good and bad, efficiency and inefficiency, profitability and the possibility of loss. The mind is a weighing machine that never rests. When we decide and act, let us not forget, we are not thinking ‘this should earn me a good night’s rest.’ That comes later. However, if good, efficiency, right, profitability etc are obtained by honest effort ‘feel good’ is likely to be an outcome. Feel good and sleep good, one could follow the other.  

We fall though. We slip. We trip. We don’t get to the finishing line. Then what?


Then we have our soldier’s fallback option; we can ask ‘did I do my best?’ We can ask ‘was I honest?’ We can ask ‘is my conscience clear?’  If we get ‘yes,’ ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ then we can sleep easy.

It also depends on not being confused by those two fascinating creatures, ‘What’s within my control’ and ‘What’s beyond my control.’  Get either wrong and you might find that the peace of mind necessary for peaceful sleep is quite elusive.

Of course the ‘what I can do’ may not take you too far. You might stop quite a ways short of ‘far enough.’  That can be disappointing. It’s possible that you just miscalculated potential. You might set out knowing well that the odds were not in your favour and still take on a challenge. We can’t always get it right. We miscalculate the possible. We miscalculate ‘control.’ Disappointment could be the bitter harvest. It stays, stays upon the tongue, corrodes the mind. End result: sleep deprivation.  

It is also about correct identification. For example, we could focus on victory (and be disappointed) or simply think of engagement as nothing more and nothing less than the affirmation of a principle. A point needs to be made. Securing objective or not, this is something eminently within our control. Unlike victory, which is not always assured.

This is why we have the phrase, ‘pick your battles.’ And so we let things pass sometimes. Sometimes we make a stand, even if it is likely that we would be swept away by the waves rushing towards us.

We may fall. We get back on our feet. We go to bed. We can still fall asleep and sleep well too, simply because we were not delusional about what was possible, what needed to be done and the importance of protecting conscience.

We are fallible because we aren’t all-knowing and all-seeing. We miscalculate, we get sequences wrong, we slip. We carry aches, pains and bruises to bed. The redeeming factor is what that ‘soldier’ said, more often than not: ‘did my best, now it is time to rest.’

malindadocs@gmail.com
 
Other articles in this series: 

The unleashing of inspiration

Write, for Pete's sake

Autumn Leaves Safeness

 Sapan and voices that erase borders

Problem elephants and problem humans

Songs from the vaekanda

The 'inhuman' elephant in a human zoo

Ivan Art: Ivanthi Fernando's efforts to align meaning

Arwa Turra, heart-stitcher

Let's help Jagana Krishnakumar rebuild our ancestral home

True national anthems

Do you have a friend in Pennsylvania (or anywhere?)

A gateway to illumination in West Virginia

Through strange fissures into magical orchards

There's sea glass love few will see 

Re-residencing Lakdasa Wikkramasinha

Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse

The responsible will not be broken

Home worlds

Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon

Did you notice the 'tiny, tiny wayside flowers'?

Gifts, gifting and their rubbishing

History is new(s)

Journalism inadvertently learned

Reflections on the young poetic heart

Wordaholic, trynasty and other portmanteaus

The 'Loku Aiya' of all 'Paththara Mallis'

Subverting the indecency of the mind

Character theft and the perennial question 'who am I?'

Innocence

A degree in people

Faces dripping with time

Saji Coomaraswamy and rewards that matter

Revolutionary unburdening

Seeing, unseeing and seeing again

Alex Carey and the (small) matter of legacy

The Edelweiss of Mirissa 

The insomnial dreams of Kapila Kumara Kalinga 

The clothes we wear and the clothes that wear us (down) 

Every mountain, every rock, is sacred 

Manufacturing passivity and obedience 

Precept and practice 

Sanjeew Lonliyes: rawness unplugged, unlimited 

In praise of courage, determination and insanity 

The relative values of life and death 

Feet that walk 

Sarinda's eyes 

Poetry and poets will not be buried 

Sunny Dayananda 

Reunion Peradeniya (1980-1990) 

What makes Oxygen breathable?  

Sorrowing and delighting the world 

The greatest fallacy  

Encounters with Liyanage Amarakeerthi 

Beyond praise and blame 

Letters that cut and heal the heart 

Vanished and vanishing trails 

Blue-blueness 

A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya 

The soft rain of neighbourliness  

The Gold Medals of being 

Jaya Sri Ratna Sri 

All those we've loved before 

Reflections on waves and markings 

A chorus of National Anthems 

Saying what and how 

'Say when' 

Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra 

The loves of our lives 

The right time, the right person 

The silent equivalent of a thousand words 

Crazy cousins are besties for life 

Unities, free and endearing 

Free verse and the return key

"Sorry, Earth!" 

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis 

The revolution is the song 

Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins 

The day I won a Pulitzer 

Ko? 

Ella Deloria's silences 

Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness 

Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable  

Thursday! 

Deveni: a priceless one-word koan 

Enlightening geometries 

Let's meet at 'The Commons' 

It all begins with a dot 

Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation 

'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone 

On sweeping close to one's feet 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

To be an island like the Roberts... 

Debts that can never be repaid in full

An island which no flood can overwhelm 

Who really wrote 'Mother'? 

A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing 

Heart dances that cannot be choreographed 

Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember 

On loving, always 

Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal 

When you turn 80... 

It is good to be conscious of nudities  

Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday  

There's a one in a million and a one in ten 

Gunadasa Kapuge is calling 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California 

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature 

Pathways missed 

Architectures of the demolished 

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts 

Who the heck do you think I am? 

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha' 

The Mangala Sabhava 

So how are things in Sri Lanka? 

The most beautiful father 

Palmam qui meruit ferat 

The sweetest three-letter poem 

Buddhangala Kamatahan 

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello 

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership 

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked 

Pure-Rathna, a class act 

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna 

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other 

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles 

Matters of honor and dignity 

Yet another Mother's Day 

A cockroach named 'Don't' 

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth 

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara 

Sweeping the clutter away 

Some play music, others listen 

Completing unfinished texts 

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn 

I am at Jaga Food, where are you? 

On separating the missing from the disappeared 

Moments without tenses 

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have) 

The world is made of waves 

'Sentinelity' 

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller 

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya' 

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist 

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses 

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced 

Some stories are written on the covers themselves 

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature 

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time  

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie 

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists? 

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords 

The books of disquiet 

A song of terraced paddy fields 

Of ants, bridges and possibilities 

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva  

World's End 

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse 

Street corner stories 

Who did not listen, who's not listening still? 

The book of layering 

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain 

The world is made for re-colouring 

The gift and yoke of bastardy 

The 'English Smile' 

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5 

Visual cartographers and cartography 

Ithaca from a long ago and right now 

Lessons written in invisible ink 

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness' 

A tea-maker story seldom told 

On academic activism 

The interchangeability of light and darkness 

Back to TRADITIONAL rice 

Sisterhood: moments, just moments 

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging 

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha 

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows 

Sirith, like pirith, persist 

Fragrances that will not be bottled  

Colours and textures of living heritage 

Countries of the past, present and future 

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched 

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains 

The ways of the lotus 

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace 

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville 

Live and tell the tale as you will 

Between struggle and cooperation 

Of love and other intangibles 

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions 

The universe of smallness 

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers 

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills 

Serendipitous amber rules the world 

Continents of the heart
  
The allegory of the slow road  

 

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