I can see the view...

Sleep.
Sleep changes everything.

When you have gone far too long without it, forcing it ... or downright begging for it, it would make sense the subject can get you well, a little tired.
Mind you, without the benefit of sleeping it off.

Since returning from my holiday trip to America, it's understandably been more disturbed than usual.

I have been trying everything to get a grip on it when one day recently, I just collapsed.
It was if my body had enough, all these years and just fell like a timber.
Like a child running and playing so hard while one second screaming at the top of their lungs - then the next, lying peacefully at the foot of the couch, or in the hallway, on the table. Wherever they happened to have their crash landing.

For me luckily, it's been in my bed.

For that and for the mere act of closing my eyes each night, dreaming away long movie-like dreams, even though lately the nightmarish kind - I am grateful.

I can already feel the weight of burdens and anxieties, the heaviness of an overloaded mind not being given the chance to unload in the night - lifted.

I awoke to a snow filled Alps outside my window. With a blue sunny sky and that perfectly crispy air you can only get on a perfectly snowy, sunny day.

And I feel like I am 29 again.
And not because I want to be because trust me, you couldn't pay me any amount of money to go there again. Any.
But I remember around there, having some kind of surreal never-ending flow of energy that didn't require sleep. And when I did get it, I was me amplified by 100.
And if I didn't spend those days becoming a songwriter, running marathons, playing on a softball team, being a nanny, chasing kids or jumping around as a clown at their parties, I would surely have had the energy to do almost anything else I could have imagined.
And back then? That's what I was doing - anything I imagined.

So although I am a bit slower, my sleep a necessity that I actually care if I get, my odd jobs long gone and marathon shoes and softball cleats hanging on the wall - I take comfort in rubbing my eyes today - saying well done, you slept.

And when I wake, my view is that of - and quite literally - a majestic long set of snowy Alps in Austria.
Something I would have been far too busy to see at 29. Or even 35.

And although I am keeping my earplugs in just a little bit longer today, I can hear the past let go, the future coming at me and the present just perfectly.

Peaceful and quiet. Just the way I had always imagined.