Are You Still There?

"Have you been updating your blog?"

"Yes, once or twice per week, but I have not been writing the thoughtful introspective posts that you prefer."

"Why not?"

"I just have not had the time, or enough sleep to really let my brain wander onto such subjects."

I have had mild insomnia for years. I cannot really call it "insomnia", however, as I do sleep. I just have trouble staying asleep for extended periods of time, and then when I wake up, whenever I wake up, that's pretty much it. On rare occasions, my body finds a way to transport itself back to the land of dreams, but more often than not, I am met with nothing but hours of fatigued wakefulnesses.

I used to date a woman that often seemed to do nothing but sleep and, at the time, it drove me a little crazy. I have since stopped caring about such things. I now take pleasure in my girlfriend's uncanny ability to sleep for hours. She can sleep at least eight hours every night, and to me it's a marvel because I think I can count the number of days I have accomplished that feat in the last three months on one hand. Even more impressive to me is that if I accidentally wake her up, she simply rolls over and falls back to sleep, often never remembering ever being awakened, or even having a full conversation.

I frequently puzzle over how much I have changed in a matter of years. Things I have realized about myself or things that have just changed. Many of the items I instinctively knew would change; a coming of age that I was sure was upon me, but also in other ways that I never really saw coming. It also appears that I was not alone in my metamorphosis. Some of my friends have changed in significant ways, with religious awakenings (both toward and away), marriage, children, illness, death, etc. The lives of the people around me suddenly seem more complex, like prisms reflecting the light of their lives in a variety of colors.

Although, I sometimes feel a tiny fraction of my friends' changes are not necessarily for the best, or have the effect of making the person less appropriate for my life. For example, I have a friend for whom religion is nearly a cult, and it unnerves me slightly. For I often do not feel like he is the same person I knew. His opinions no longer feel like his own, but are more akin to a doctrine of sorts. Keeping the hard line. I suppose that is how it goes sometimes, but I wonder if an extreme of any religion, no matter the purity of intent, is the correct path to pursue. Many of his friends seem to be asking questions similar to this and I am not sure anyone has a good answer. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps the only answer is that sometimes you can no longer be the same with a person as you were before.

(This post sort of meandered on through my stream of consciousness, but I felt it got cumbersome and was unlikely to be read in full. So, I cut about half of it out.)