Savouring Simple Daily Pleasures
For most of my life, I have regarded napping with a certain suspicion.
A nap felt like wasted time. An indulgence. Perhaps even a small sign of weakness.
I was not a napper.
Even as a brand-new, thoroughly sleep-deprived parent, when a precious window of opportunity appeared and someone suggested I sleep while the baby slept, I resisted. There were things to be done. The day was already too short. Surely sleeping in the middle of it was somehow cheating.
And then, of course, there was the aftermath.
I would wake feeling groggy and disoriented, inevitably craving something crunchy and sugary — cookies, chocolate-covered Scotch Fingers, anything that could deliver an immediate little jolt of comfort. Then I would worry that the nap had ruined my sleep for that night, which seemed to confirm my long-held suspicion that naps were more trouble than they were worth.
So I simply didn't nap.
For decades.
Perhaps it was partly inherited. My mother is not a napper either. My father, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoys his naps. Given the opportunity, he will happily settle into an armchair and disappear for a while.
My husband is much the same. If time allowed, I suspect he would happily take an hour-long nap every day.
Although the girls and I have mercilessly ribbed him for years about the startled way he wakes from one — however gentle the intentions of the person attempting to rouse him.
There is something wonderfully universal about a sleeping man suddenly returning to consciousness as though he has just been summoned from another dimension.
And then there were my grandparents.
They were professionals.
Every afternoon, my grandfather would make a little nest for Grannie. In winter, she would be tucked up like a fragile little bird beside the hearth; in summer, he would find her a shady spot in the garden. They called it forty winks.
It was simply part of the rhythm of their day.
No guilt. No productivity anxiety. No checking the clock and calculating whether they had somehow squandered an hour.
Just rest.
I think I am finally beginning to understand it.
Now that my girls are grown, I find myself at home in the quiet more frequently. The house has changed. There is less rushing, less noise, fewer demands pulling me in ten directions at once.
And every now and then, after a productive morning, I find myself with an afternoon that has nowhere in particular to be.
So I nap.
Intentionally.
I don't collapse into bed exhausted or accidentally fall asleep in front of the television. I actually prepare for it.
I prop the dress pillows on the bed behind me so I can nestle into them. I pull the throw blanket from the end of the bed over myself. I silence my phone. I put a book nearby.
And then I lie down for thirty or forty minutes.
That's it.
Thirty or forty minutes of absolutely nothing being required of me.
Sometimes I don't even sleep deeply. Sometimes I simply drift in that delicious space between waking and dreaming, where the body becomes heavy and the mind finally stops trying to organise the next thing.
And the sounds around me become part of it.
Our stream babbling outside.
Birdsong.
Rain on the roof.
The distant hum of a mower.
The steady ticking of the clock.
And, if I'm particularly fortunate, the rumble of one of my cats, who has apparently decided that my nap is an invitation to join me.
Cats, naturally, are experts at this.
They have never once looked at a sunny patch of floor and thought, I really ought to be doing something productive.
They understand instinctively what I have taken most of my life to learn: rest is not something you earn only after everything else has been done.
Rest is part of life.
There is something almost ridiculously luxurious about a nap when you allow yourself to fully surrender to it.
Not luxury in the expensive or extravagant sense. There is no hotel suite, cashmere robe or champagne involved.
This is a quieter kind of luxury.
The luxury of time.
The luxury of silence.
The luxury of knowing that, for half an hour, nobody needs anything from you.
Perhaps that is why I still feel a tiny flicker of guilt sometimes.
Thirty minutes can feel enormous when you have spent a lifetime measuring your worth by what you accomplish in those thirty minutes.
I still occasionally wake from a nap and have that fleeting thought: Shouldn't I have been doing something?
But I'm learning to let the thought pass.
Because I am doing something.
I am resting.
And when I get up, I often feel better for it. Not always perfectly refreshed, not magically transformed, but softer somehow. More patient. More present.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is that the nap itself has become less important than the permission I give myself to take it.
I am learning that self-care doesn't always have to be worthy or disciplined or productive.
Sometimes it can simply feel wonderful.
Sometimes it can be a little indulgent.
Sometimes it can be forty winks beside the fire, just as it was for my grandparents all those years ago.
And perhaps there is something rather lovely about finally becoming good at something my father and grandparents understood all along.
I think I am finally a napper.
And honestly?
It's sheer quiet luxury.
