Absorbing Shock Waves

            Between a most productive Saturday and pleasant things on Monday, my in between Sunday found me soaking in the sleep. (To do me one better, God added rain and a purring cat. I live for these kinda sleeps.)

            Regarding me and sleep, well let’s just say we’ve not always been friends. As a kid I used to sleep walk. Some say that’s inherited. I don’t know. My great grandmother slept walked herself right off a second story balcony and broke her back I’m told. I’ve also been told I sleep talk. Can’t confirm or deny that one, but I do wake myself up laughing sometimes.

If you believe the studies, I, along with most of the country, don’t get enough sleep. Me? I average 3 – 4 hours a night, and for the times I do get more, it comes in shifts (meaning I sleep 3, wake  2, sleep 2 more--a thing I used to fight. Now I just roll with it. Thank God for laptops and journals.)

            When sleeping in shifts (with a wake period in between) the second round is less like sleep, more like a trance. Something other worldly about this 5 - 7 morning shift that’s worthy of a research, but I’m busy so I can’t. Instead I just marvel and thank God for whenever it hits as it’s really quite healing. Part lucid, part meditative all I can say is it’s very deep and it’s most restorative. Doesn’t happen every sleep cycle; wish it did. On days I have meetings or big things on the agenda you can forget it. Like knowing you’ve got a plane to catch, anticipation will keep a brain half awake since it knows something’s coming, lest you miss the clock. (We’ve all been there.)

            But on this particular Sunday, I’ve got no clocks…. My gift of the weekend is this 2-hour, thought-defying state of sleep to bask in, so I soak it up for all it’s worth.

            While floating mindlessly in this tranquil state (around 6:30 am) I hear a loud…CRACK! (Maybe it was SNAP! I don’t have the right onomatopoeia word here-- you know...a word that sounds like the actual sound it makes, like the CRACK of whip or the RING of a phone.) Insert your own loud sound word here. What I heard was somewhere between a tree snapping and a roof cracking, which is to say it was sudden; it was loud, and it was abrupt. The noise ripped me right out of my peaceful, floaty place, with no stops in between. And it was caused by…? I haven’t a clue…probably the roof settling or a tree falling. It wasn’t so much what made the sound as where the sound energy went, which is to say throughout my body.

            In that instant, and because of the contrasting relaxed state it ripped me out of, I was more aware than usual of what this did to my body, which is to say it rippled… literally rippled throughout my circuitry like those shock waves you see on earthquake reports. It went from the center out (center, being my heart I guess, maybe my brain?) and it rippled. Only this happened in a split second, and then it faded.

Now bolted wide awake, I see the cat’s still snoozing and the dogs aren’t barking, so my initial reaction is not so much fear, as it is curiosity. “What was that?” gave way to “Did I just absorb that energy?” My mind didn’t shoot to fear as its initial responder, though my adrenals had clearly flipped a switch.

What I was mindful of was my body absorbing the sound… I felt it come into my body, but I never felt it leave. Like those near misses we encounter from time to time, the body did a jerk, and then it moves on. Ever trip and almost fall but don’t? Ever swerved when a trucker shifts lanes? Those near misses carry a similar vibe where it could’ve (but thank God, didn’t) happened. Still, your body braced for it, as if. False alarms maybe false to the outer world, but inside your body, nothing false about it. For a split second your body doesn’t know if/when so it braces for both …after which we go back to our tic-tock lives, just absorbing the shock and forgetting it ever happened.

But this vibe went somewhere; I had absorbed it for sure. My adrenals triggered (something woke me), but it wasn’t enough to send feet to floor. But in the seconds that followed, I was keenly aware of the shock in my system that had come and then dissolved itself into ....?

If energy never dies, but only changes forms, then where do these non-essential frequencies go? And what about the shock waves that we intentionally sign on for? The scary movie that keeps us gripped…Those free fall rides at the fair…As if our bodies didn’t have enough to process just digesting our food, how much shock energy DO we knowingly and unknowingly absorb that stays stuck in our cells?

In this case, I felt my cells absorb it. Sure, it would subside, but does it ever truly leave? Normal patterns of behavior being what they are—most of us do one of two things: roll over and go back to sleep or wake up, get on with the day. Instead I’m lying here comparing my mini little shock wave to the macro of an earth quake…when it hits me: isn’t the reason they say bigger ones are coming because tectonic plates once shifted, only keep shifting? (If that’s true for the planet, what happens to a body?)

            I for one don’t want to go digging for triggers. Nor do I like thinking about the layers of unprocessed stress spewing out at the most inopportune time. Right now I'm talking an interrupted sleep state. I’m not factoring the myriad of stresses we carry around from unresolved emotions and unforgiven hurts…and endless other feelings we tuck away and pretend aren’t really there. 

No conclusion to this one folks. Just an observation…though it did leave me wondering how many other things our bodies absorb while we aren't paying attention. More than this, I’m wondering if there’s some pressure cooker valve for the waves already in there, that need processing out. (Thank God for long road trips to ponder things such as these. If only Einstein were still living and had a FB page to ask.)