On Getting Out of Bed

I just took a brief nap.

It’s the late afternoon, and I’ve come home ready to pursue my list of plans, and yet I just feel so sleepy that it’s hard not to make myself think a nap will help, even though now, as always, I feel sleepier still. As I’m typing, I feel constantly distracted by the thought of lying down again, and it is difficult to repeatedly cast about for a reason to be uncomfortable.

Fatigue and afternoon naps are not really the meat of what Alan Noble’s book On Getting Out of Bed is about, but there is some small resemblance, at least in the actual matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I found Noble’s book deeply encouraging because of the openness with which he writes about his own struggle to meet the day, in a way that I am only occasionally able to twist in my own head into the kind of admonition to responsibility that I feel so anxious of.

I haven’t resolved all my trepidations about God and all the roots of motivational paralysis; I am scared of accepting that we can’t solve all of our problems, and instead just receiving life as a gift, because I worry about what I imagine that might leave out. And I am troubled by the idea that we can waste our lives, moment by moment, because that is the very pressure of anxiety that so often troubles me – the persistent weight of feeling that I should be doing something else right now. The idea of choosing to live each day is compelling, but the implication that one can passively destroy one’s life through paralysis upsets me, because it feels like an ultimatum, when what I want is the safety of knowing all shall be well no matter what I do or don’t do – and yet I also want what I do to matter, paradoxically. And even the encouragement to simply do the next thing feels like a sleight of hand one does to oneself, trying to forget the cumulative weight of responsibilities beyond the moment. In short, my various complaints to God are unresolved. But part of the strength of the book is that it doesn’t try to resolve every problem I might have with it, or arrive at every answer, but rather to simply take the next step to live, regardless:

“If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.”