Naptime?

Feel like taking a nap? Do you have any projects left to do, does the grass need mowing, how about washing the windows, are the tools all sorted out and put away, and the list keeps on going……is everything done……forever. But, I still feel like a nap. A quick “power nap!” But…….

Why do we choose not to nap? Many places in the world take naps, a siesta, a brief time out, but Americans as a rule do not. Even south of the border they take naps! In Japan, they have cots set up for afternoon naps at work. But in a lot of work places, and at home - naps are to be avoided. A waste of time, and since it feels good it cannot be respectable. Is this a Puritan value that came over on the Mayflower? Napping is too luxurious, to sybaritic, too unproductive, and its free; pleasures for which we don’t pay make us anxious. Our society has progressed thru wars, depressions, landing a man on the moon, and other countless achievements, and all without naps! Just think what we could have accomplished with a good nap!

Consider the cat. A perfectly healthy cat can nap thru the entire month of February and wake feeling the better for it. The lowly mouse may have taken over the house, but not a twitch of guilt or a whisker will move on a napping cat. In summer the cat will stretch out in a doorway, and in winter the window sills in bright sunlight will attract the napping cat. The world continues as the cat naps, and as he awakes, he stretches and becomes frisky, playful and does what a cat does.

Napping is not a shameful, shiftless activity, where only when we are experiencing 104 degree temperatures, flu, colds, pulled muscles are when we decide to lay down and rejuvenate and heal. That those are the only times we should experience a good cleansing nap.

The reclining and effortless body and quiet bedroom, couch, chair, park bench can free the mind of mundane tasks and allow it the freedom of roaming thru complex problems, thoughts. At times like these creative solutions can tip toe into our minds ready for us upon rising. After a good nap I may awake and see the road paved clearly in front of me to a perplexing haunting problem.

Just because I nap, does not make me unproductive. I may write a novel, or find a new solution to an old problem. After all Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" in bed. Winston Churchill wrote all of his large important histories from his bed, with a brandy beside him. So he would take nip and then nap. I shall nap on this and see what answers my dreams produce.

Happy Napping