Turning Over a New Leaf - July Newsletter

"Wake up! Waaake uuuup!" Our two-year-old has started saying this before bed lately. I wasn't sure what she was actually communicating at first with her words, since saying, "Wake up!" before bed didn't make sense to me. I believe I discovered their meaning today.

We were driving home from a fun morning spent exploring a new playground, one of her chief delights. Usually after a morning of lots of physical play, she nods off peacefully in her car seat, not able to keep her eyes open for even a ten minute ride home. Today, she cried out what I'd been hearing at night: "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" Again, I tried to figure out what she was really trying to tell us.

I believe I finally understood that she was fighting herself, trying to will her half-closed eyes open, her mind to stay conscious and not give in to the dreams drifting in. I heard her not wanting to miss a single moment of the day's treats, experiences, tastes, smells, textures and sounds. There are books to read on our laps, games to make up that leave us collapsed together in fits of giggles, strawberries to eat with sticky fingers, another slide to go down, and more creations to make with play-doh. Sleep takes her away from these delights, and she may not understand that they will be there for her when she wakes. She lives so fully in the present, not planning ahead or thinking of later like we adults are prone to do so much of the time.

Have you ever heard your own voice cry, "Wake up!"?

The concept of awakening runs through mythology and literature from the Zen Buddhist tale of the oxherder to Kate Chopin's story, "The Awakening." We even have a saying, "Wake up and smell the coffee!" that means, "Look at reality!" We can go through our days driving the same route to work, going up and down the same aisles at the grocery store, walking past the same tree and never really see what is around us. We become habituated, moving on automatic pilot.

Some of these routines are needed for us to function. We'd be so overwhelmed each day with new information that we couldn't do what we needed to get done to eat, sleep and pay the rent. It is when our habits get woven too deeply into too many threads of our lives, when we stop seeing the uniqueness of each sunset, the face of the coworker we think we know so well, or the hearts of the people we live with each day, when we don't taste the cereal we eat every morning or know why we check email 79 times a day, that we need to hear someone cry loudly, "Wake up!"

What if we lived as if we didn't know we'd wake up from our sleep to the world again? Because the reality is, we don't.

We don't know that at all.

Wake up!

~ ~ ~

Coaching questions:

1) What part of your life is crying, "Wake up!"? What have you fallen asleep to in your life?

2) What does "living awake" mean to you?

3) What will you change based on your answers?