Sanity Ran Off and Left Me

Not long ago, as I neared a small but tangled highway intersection on the edge of Hot Springs, Arkansas, I was struck by the similarities between humans and ants. Not their physical appearance, of course, but the deliberate nature of their frenetic behavior. Like ants engaged in the collection of food or some other keenly focused tasks, people on the move appear driven to accomplish…something. Watching lines of cars swoop around big curves leading from one roadway to another, I wondered whether the drivers actually think about their objectives or, instead, simply respond to environmental cues—like zombies. People seem to be mindlessly performing tasks to which they are assigned: drive from point A to point B; exit the vehicle in a grocery store parking lot; purchase celery and a slab of salt pork; hand a five dollar bill to a derelict who is returning shopping carts to the front of the store. Maybe, though, these vacant behaviors are not mindless. Perhaps they are meticulously programmed in the same way some ants are directed to change direction in mid-stream, bumping head first into hundreds of other ants with critical jobs to perform. What could those contrarian ants be thinking or feeling? Have they received signals from supervisory ants, telling them to do an about-face? Or have they just remembered they failed to leave instructions with ant larvae about how to progress to the next stage of development? It’s the same with people, I think. We could just as well be ants. We seem to need tasks to perform, jobs to do, functions to fulfill. But, if we lack purpose, we wander around in parking lots, collecting money in return for keeping shopping carts readily accessible. Or we offer ourselves up as clerks in clothing stores, where we dutifully fold shirts and slacks that lazy, arrogant, imperious people leave scattered about. It’s a damn good thing that people and ants cannot rust. But corrosive paralysis may be just what we need to understand why we sometimes act like our minds are made of wet paper.

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I may have set a sleep record yesterday during the day and through the night. Nobel Prizes are awarded annually in the areas of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Disappointment washes over me like a tsunami whenever I consider the fact that there is no Nobel Sleep Prize. Why would there not be? Who made the decision to leave sleep out of the mix? Wait, maybe it’s not the Nobel Prize I’m after; perhaps it’s the Guinness World Record for Sleep that’s missing. Either way, it’s unfortunate that someone forgot to include such an astounding feat in the record books. 

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My alarm clock must awaken me no later than 9:30 this morning, just two hours from now. I have to be ready for my M.D. Anderson registration, which will take place at 10 by way of telephone and online portal. In the interim, though, despite my record-breaking sleep, I need to crawl back into a deep slumber. I assume the intensity of my need for sleep is the result of my most recent chemo or the settling in of anxiety that’s more acute than I originally thought. Oh, well. Sleep is healing, they say.