Midday Musings

I am sure this has happened to all of us, sometime or the other – waking up in the middle of the night and then being unable to go back to sleep. Now what do you do when you are awake? Usually I fight to go back to sleep. I keep tossing and turning…keep telling myself 'go to sleep go to sleep'. More often than not this doesn't work. The same thing happened yesterday night. All of a sudden I found myself looking at the ceiling. I turned sideways and the bedside clock said 3:05 am. As is my habit I started tell myself to 'fall asleep' when all of a sudden an idea came to mind. I decided that today I won't make any effort, I won't struggle. I'll just lie there, silently, quietly and see what happened. Did I succeed? Yes. The blinds on our door were not rolled down yesterday (which was good) because it was a full moon night and the moonlight flooded the balcony and also half our room. I looked at the silhouette of the huge trees standing tall and straight, the plants in my balcony, their leaves swaying ever so slightly and shining bright when it caught the moonlight. It was all so quiet, which was broken down occasionally by the whoosh of a car.

And then my ears caught a steady rhythmic sound pattern. It was my husband breathing -- in and out, in and out, with the occasional sighs. Listening to the beat of his breathing I thought what would it look like if I started plotting his breathing pattern on a graph? And when I tried to imagine the graph pattern the stock market graph patterns came to mind. (This I'm pretty sure is a result of all the stock market review we do first thing in the morning.) Considering his breathing pattern yesterday it would have looked like the graph of Cisco – stable with minor deflections. I know there have been days when his breathing pattern very much resembles that of Aruba (his own company), swinging from highs to lows, stable for a brief while, then back to swinging again. And somewhere in the middle of all this Cisco and Aruba graph plotting I fell asleep, only to wake up at the sound of an emergency siren which was nothing else but our alarm!