Relative Something

It has been a pretty cool spring, thus far. After serious drought-like conditions, we’ve now had several days of rain in a row. Cold and wet is not my favorite way to ride bike. The good news is that maybe the gloomy weather we’ve had recently will be spent and as often happens, get followed by warm sunny days! I’ll pack some warm clothes, just as insurance, based on the old adage that if I have it, I won’t need it, but if I don’t bring it along, I’ll absolutely regret it.

Looks like good sleeping weather, too. Those of you who need to be awakened by an alarm clock may recognize this phenomenon: often times waking just minutes before the alarm is scheduled to signal. I wonder what is going on to trigger that? This morning, I woke about a half hour early and lingered in bed, doing the snooze thing, fading in and out of sleep. Some really interesting dreams happen in the morning after I fall back asleep, or at least it’s that I am better able to remember the dreams that happen then. This morning I was dreaming that it was now just 2 minutes before the alarm was going to trigger and for some reason that startled me awake, only to find that it wasn’t that close and I still had 13 minutes till alarm. Hmmm. Was I anxious about waking on time this morning?

In a few days, I will have Jim Klobuchar blowing a whistle in short bursts for an alarm. Often times I’m already awake and listening to the early bird bikers clicking their tent poles as they take down their tents and head off to find morning coffee. I fall more in the middle, not the earliest and not one of the ones that sleep until the last minute. I like to avoid living out the dreams where I am coming out of my tent to find everyone is already packed up and I am the only one left and then can’t find something I am needing to pack. You know, those classic anxiety dreams. I find I have less anxiety dreams when I manage my life well enough to experience less anxiety. The logic works for me.

Maybe I was anxious this morning because when I went to sleep, I was struggling with another interesting phenomenon: I am sure that when I got home from Nepal and unpacked, I placed one of the stuff sacks I used, somewhere special, knowing I would need it again for this bike trip. For the life of me I couldn’t recall last night and it wasn’t anywhere logical that I could think to look. Don’t you just love that?