Sleepless in Seattle

It's 1:06 am and I am awake. I have been up for hours, wondering why I have been up for hours. I have had enough chemical help, frankly, to knock out a racehorse, and yet here I am. Still awake and running, just like a racehorse. Just as no amount of pain killer ever numbed me at the dentist, nothing, and I mean nothing, knocks me out enough to sleep. I read about someone like me once, a man who could not sleep more than an hour or so a night. Apparently, he finally made peace with his insomnia and earned an MD and a JD in his spare time. I've thought about that. I seem to have twice as much time as the average person. Might as well earn another degree or two. Apparently I've got the time.

In the movie "Midnight in Paris", which I wrote about a few days ago, Owen Wilson plays a character who just wanders the streets of Paris at midnight, and he eventually wanders into Paris in the 1920's, where he feels very much at home. Tonight, I cannot get that idea out of my head. I'm contemplating wandering the streets of Seattle at night, on the chance that I too might somehow wander into Paris in the twenties. No one would bother me, because I am not the sort people bother. I would be safely invisible.

After such a high flying week, I suppose it was inevitable I would sink down into reality tonight. Tomorrow, my blades will hit the ice, and there will be no sound except the slice of each blade across the virgin ice. The air will be cold on my face, and I will relax through motion. Every muscle that is now wound tight as a drum will find a happy release on the ice. There is a harness at the gym for practicing spins, attached to coiled cables. In it, you are freed from gravity, from concern of falling, fear of injury, and therefore you are free to be more than you could be before, on the ground. Like any sport, like writing or flying or fencing, it is a form of defying gravity, and once you do it, you get it. Life on the ground is often very painful. Why wouldn't you leave it?

Any art or sport is about defying gravity for a moment at a time. It is about leaving the ground, leaving behind the pain, the worries, the care, the unfulfilled dreams, the dashed hopes, the failures and unspoken truths we all carry around hidden in our pockets. Through art or sport we become more than ourselves, a better, edited version of who we really are. We cannot even hope to be perfect in real life, and some of us, like myself, stumble so miserably through any human experience that perfection through creation of a piece of art, or one perfect run, one perfect fencing bout, one perfect landing, one perfect spin is our only real shot at happiness.

Meanwhile, we wander. Through streets in the rain, through the winding pathways of our own minds and hearts, hoping to find what we are looking for if we just keep looking long enough. Might as well wander. I mean, I'm up. Maybe someday I'll run into happiness. Maybe I'll run into peace.

Maybe I'll run into Hemingway.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.