By Sam Verma
Work. Stress. Deadlines.
The feeling of stress is easier for us to recall than to remember the last time we truly felt at peace, and that’s because stress is always there. The nagging voice, the increasing amplitude of the pesky noise getting louder, pressure building. It almost feels like at some point, after all the throbbing you endured, it’ll break free from your skull and well….at least you’ll finally be free.
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Figuratively speaking, sometimes it does breakthrough. You drag your weary body onto your bed and before you know it, it is just you and the silence. The comforts of your bed. How long has it been since you appreciated how soft the sheets are? Did you always know that or are you only now realising it?
The silence is loud. How long has it been since you didn’t sensory overload your stress loaded brain? Time is static, perhaps it is as dynamic as it’s ever been. The beauty of lying down while surrounded by things to do is symbolically the rejection of stress. You won’t even find yourself timing the process. You simply lay. As your heavy body rests, you feel it leaving your system. The anger and the stress gets pushed into the corner of your head like two spoilt kids who went too far. The brain needs a break.
If you’ve experienced this, I’m sure you’ll agree that this tends to happen at night when you’re all alone. No one coming in to check up on you. No classes to attend. The buzzing of the phone reduces as time passes. My stance remains ambiguous and undecided but these are the few moments I think about the duality of man and feel as though I am a mind in a body. It’s almost as if my mind knew there would be no rush, no deadlines and it seized the opportunity.
The act of lying down due to sensory overload is never pre-decided, it kind of defeats the purpose. You can’t decide that at 1 am on a Thursday school night you will simply have had enough. I think that’s what I like most about the act of lying down. It’s so reflexive and so natural, it makes me feel human. It makes me feel like I’m alive because when I lie down and do nothing but lying down, this sudden awareness of my own body takes over my mind. The rising and falling of my chest. The cold air circulated by the fan washing over my body, feeling it on my skin. Although I lie in a bed above the ground, in a room that is far up above the ground, I feel like I’ve been grounded and brought back to Earth.
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The conclusion? The importance of lying down is realising that to truly perform, you need to feel like yourself. Doing work, listening to others, doing things you don’t want to do while not really listening to your body transforms us into a puppet played around by authority and consequences. It’s important to simply not do anything because it's ingrained into our heads that we must always be doing something. It’s important to not do anything without guilt.
It’s important to feel alive and be aware of your existence, that’s what makes us human.
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