How to Forget Your Own Needs!

I’m still slightly desperately reading up on toddler’s sleeping habits, and in the process I have learned something about sleep deprivation. Although you would think that a sleep deprived person would drop into slumber at the first real opportunity, it is actually the case that the less sleep you get, the harder it can be to get to sleep or to stay asleep. If babies do not nap for long enough during the day it is harder for them to fall asleep at night. They forget how it is to be rested.

It seems to me that the principle works for almost everything. If we neglect our needs, whether they are for playing sports, or musical instruments, for love, social contact, making things, whatever they may be, the longer we leave them the harder it becomes to break some internal barrier that our organism erects and start fulfilling them again. Why the barrier, to protect ourselves from the painful awareness of an unmet need? Whatever it is, it is quite effective.

The problem becomes chronic when we completely lose touch with the needs themselves, so they become abstract, or feel not part of who we are today. “I used to play the piano, before I had children/ I used to dance when I was young…” or we forget about them altogether and live with a constant sense of being slightly unfulfilled, which we can’t quite place.

Forgetting our needs is easier to do than we think. Conscious effort is required once that burning need to do something has faded away from lack of use. So, starting today I want to make a point of keeping in touch, at least, with all the things I need to do to feel both stretched and satisfied. Even if I can’t do them all right now!

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