Little Victories

 As someone who periodically suffers from insomnia, I can say that I am eternally grateful for the evolution of television.

When I was a mere slip of a lad going to bed on a Sunday night, I carried with me the troubles of the world. My world, anyway. With a head full of anxietiy about what might happen the following day at school, I would often lay in my bed, alternately staring at the ceiling of my room or closing my eyes tight to force sleep to come. Neither of these strategies worked very effectively. 

Then there was the "sleep" function the clock radio at my bedside provided. Twisting that nob to the left allowed me to have sixty minutes of soothing music from a distant station fill my room with distraction. For fifty-nine minutes. Fifty eight minutes. I was far too clever to let the passage of time go unnoticed and if I was still awake as that switch went off I knew that I had just lost another hour long battle with the voices in my head. 

That's when I called my parents. At the time this seemed like a reasonable request. Hollering from my room down the hall from theirs, my expectation was that one of them would hear my plaintive cries and come swiftly to my rescue. It was their job to bring me calm reassurance that would help me settle into dreamland. But not without listening to a flurry of my circular arguments for why I would never fall asleep again. Sometimes it only took one of these mildly exasperated visits from my father, who apparently felt responsible or was not as good at rock, paper, scissors as my mother. If I pushed it past a second or third intervention, I knew I was going to be on my own. 

What I hadn't reckoned was that I had fallen asleep every night for more than a decade, albeit with some difficulty, but I had made that transition to Dreamland eventually. It was the eventual part that continued to confound me. 

Fast forward fifty years. I continue to wrestle at times with the occasional sleepless night. I have lived through being the parent to a child who reminded me of those struggles with his own sleep challenges. Many times those visits to his bedroom would set off a similar wave of late-night agitation in my own head. Which is why I am grateful that we had a television in our room. 

No longer does the broadcasting day cease at midnight, leaving snowy static in its wake. Now there are hundreds of channels to wash over me as I attempt to calm my brain into rest. I do this without the sound turned on, so as not to wake my wife who has her own stirrings to consider. I lay there, flipping about the channels until I find something that takes me away from the anxious moments before dawn. Something without a plot to distract me, or one with a familiar story that allows me to get lost in the tide that will lead me to rest. Infomercials will also do, in a pinch. 

In my memory, I can hear my father's tired voice reminding me of the inevitability of sleep. I try and let go of the problems of the day and those waiting just over the horizon. At some point, I feel my head sink further into my pillow as my thumb pushes the power button on the remote control. I have done it again. 

Little victories.