Monday Musings 269 – As I wake up..

Monday Musings 269 – As I wake up..

I ask myself - what is the first emotion I feel as I wake up? As I open my eyes and the slumber wears off and I become aware of being alive, not yet becoming aware of where exactly I am opening my eyes but only the awareness that I am indeed still there – where the weight of my situation has yet not burdened my soul. What do I feel in that few uncorrupted seconds? Not what is on my mind or what I am thinking but how am I feeling?

Do I wake up with a feeling of some kind of heaviness? There is no real reason to feel this way for everything is fine but the dawn of wakefulness is heavy, like the child who enters a dark room in his own house – he is comforted by familiarity of the house and yet discomforted by the dark.

Do I wake up with a feeling of dull alarm that the body intuitively feels when it is in danger which is yet not corroborated by facts but is palpable in the bones so to speak? There is no reason to feel this way for everything is fine but the dawn of wakefulness comes with an inexplicable anxiety, like moving in a wilds, the jungle – comforted by our abilities to meander through and yet acutely aware that it is the wilds that we are passing through.

Do I wake up with a feeling of weightlessness, a feeling of no feeling at all? I become aware of everything, my body, my surroundings, my situations and I feel nothing. I am here and yet I am not here. I am levitating above and beyond almost making fun of the mundane. I am untouched and detached. Actually detached is not the right word - detachment is deliberate, a conscious attempt to severe attachment; this feeling is a stage deeper – as if I never had an anchor or ties or reasons. Like clouds.

Do I wake up with a feeling of unadulterated joy – as if I feel like dancing the moment I become aware that I am awake. There is no reason to feel this way but I am almost looking forward to getting up. There is a zing in my being that wants to give life a fresh shot. I surprise myself with this energy even as I am only becoming aware of being awake. It’s like the mountain spring which is hurtling down the slope, with no purpose but only still being purposive in its flow.

Do I wake up smiling? I am smiling as the first shimmer of wakefulness is emerging from the dark abyss of sleep. I have no reason to smile but I feel like smiling, there is some vague happiness that I know exists somewhere deep down, in the acute realisation that I have more than I need, in the comfort that I have more than what I thought I will ever have, in the thankfulness that I have more than what many others have. I wake up with gratitude although in this twilight of wakefulness and slumber I am not yet aware of the word ‘gratitude’ for this stage is beyond language – so I wake up smiling, for no apparent reason at all.

Do I wake up in a hurry, an abruptness that is so jerky that it shatters both – the calm of the sleep and the joy of getting up? I have noticed an egg hatching  and an cow giving birth to a calf as a kid in my village and I was always intrigued about the ‘slowness and the gradualness’ of the process. There was no abruptness to it. Abruptness  kills. Young children wake up gradually, adults wake up abruptly. It is a fait accompli or can something be done about it?

I am becoming more and more aware of how I feel in that fleeting moment, where sleep dissolves and a young day of wakefulness is born.