To appreciate my current life and times, you have to drop by around 4 AM. Particularly on a night when Jane is out of town. That’s when I am possessed by the notion that I can’t get out of bed. Note that this is not neuromuscularly groundless. Things are not what they were. My aging body may be losing what the fitness buffs term ‘core strength’. Not to mention flexibility.
From the consumer’s point of view, it is a little hard to believe. I am currently writing about Amtrak trips I took around the year 2000…alone, traveling upstairs on a mercilessly shaking train…tending to all bodily functions including getting in and out of the dining car several times. So the notion that I couldn’t lift my body from the Amtrak bed, well, simply never would have occurred to me.
It is occurring to me now. At four in the morning it is occurring so forcefully that I lie there brooding on the prospect. Well, not so much brooding as paralyzed. That is to say, further paralyzed. This time by fear. My mood shifts from mild disquiet to immobilizing terror. The latter is, of course, utterly inexplicable.
A little death…not the more enjoyable French version…but something homegrown and suggesting a true end. How would I die? On my back and unable to breathe. Somehow. Which brings me to my recent Minnesota conference experience. I visited similar feelings every night. Could I get into the hard cabin bed, position myself and then emerge of a morning? The first two chores were accomplished with minimal bother. Enough, one would think, to reassure the sleeper that the final chore wasn’t worth contemplating until dawn. Which, of course, was wrong. For at some point dawn is transformed from a regularly scheduled celestial event…into a menacing specter. Judgment Day. The hour of reckoning. Can I or can’t I? And if I can’t, how long will I lie there…and will I breathe?
Tracking down the origins of such terror isn’t all that hard. The temporarily abandoned infant. The newly paralyzed young adult. Primal fears unpleasantly combining into the present. There being a thread of respiratory truth bound up in all this. To this day, my chest remains partially paralyzed. I get by with a little help from my friends, the abdominals.
Which, it turns out, is just enough to calm me through a crisis. Which is the essential thing I picked up during my conference week. Panic takes over. Such is our brain physiology. And one of the easiest ways to return to logical function is to breathe. Slowly. Deeply. Evenly. This is hardly news, but for me it is a useful tip.
Particularly at 4 AM. When instead of making secretly desperate lunges at arising, I calm myself enough to think matters through. In the end I rely on automation. Ours is a hospital-type bed that cranks up. Electrically. True, it doesn’t crank me out of bed. But it’s possible to drop my legs off the edge of the mattress and position my torso so that the bed’s tilting works in my favor. A reassuring reality. For now.