Bicycle Fountains of Quiet (Trouble Sleeping)

Brain overflowing

Up late, up early, uneven, disturbed sleep in between, as if too many thoughts seeking too many answers launched too many solver processes to worry through them all in parallel**, and the monitors are unhappy with the lack of progress, and the admins are displeased with the preliminary results, and Finance is freaked about the cost overruns, and the execs want more for less faster sooner better cheaper before the whole outhouse burns itself down or the competition figures it all out too soon.

Sun splashy

They undermine themselves, those urgent solvers, self-undoing by firing through the different possible outcomes, weighing factors, proposing and rejecting solutions, exploring alternate scenarios, they fervently seek out the answers they're assigned to formulate, but don't realize, can't realize, that their own ardent search for resolution is self-limiting in its expenditure of energy in search of more energy: they're sprinting up a hill to meet up with a sprint coach to teach them better sprinting technique, and making themselves miss their appointment due to bad technique, bonking too soon, driving off the side of the hill, rolling to a complete stop and falling over sideways due to lack of forward momentum.  Oh how will we ever make it up the hill fast enough to learn to sprint faster, worry worry worry, they churn away, they do, all through the night. Look at me, I'm sprinting, ever more, never better though.

Oh solvers! Oh worry threads! Cease, pause, suspend. Don't end up like one of those mountain bike noobs trying clipless pedals the first time up too steep a hill, then realizing they can't unclip too late as they run out of momentum on a bad spot on the hill.*

A few moments, please. Of quiet, of contemplation, of sunrise spearing through the citrus trees and exploding through the water fountaining from the irrigation pipe. Work to prepare for work. Plant quiet seeds for tonight. Sleep needs less of your solving and more recollections of recollected moments of light sparkling on water on a quiet morning ride. Renewal, sundogs, ripe fruit still an unpicked riddle up there. Water them with lovely thoughts, poured over, abandonment of concern.

Good timing on the sprinkler system there

Sprinklers turn on, and spray up a memory of my own first irrigation run, so long ago. Mid-monsoon rain storm, lightning and thunder, water running off the roof in sheets, if intense snow is a white-out, what is intense rain that you can't see through, what is thunder that shatters your thoughts, what are memories that spray up at sunrise and push away the madding crowd of solver worry threads? I open my valves at the appointed moment, checked the time with WWV atomic clock to make sure I was right, but no water was coming in. Had I done something wrong, missed something, overlooked, omitted a step somewhere? Had I forgotten? Would we go dry? What was happening? How does this water flow???

A neighbor appeared, shouting over the wall, yelling to be heard above the crazy storm din: IT'LL COME IN ANY MINUTE NOW, so I bent back over, stared into the space beneath the rusty iron valve cover, and out it did come. With water already standing in my yard from the downpour, I thought, thank goodness we got irrigation. An August night. Long ago. But its recall quieted the solvers for a respite moment, the worry threads niced up, and in terms of balance and peace, there was some, a modicum there on that side street on my bicycle, pausing and squinting into this sunflare moment. Let. It. Be.

Nicely flared, lens and sun, nicely flared

*like I did 

**it is often true and frequently wise that greater inner peace results from embracing and resolving an issue at time of occurrence or at least at the moment the resolution is known, rather than putting it off till later, for many reasons, that is, right up until the limit is passed, when it seems like worrying and solving in a timely manner is all you're doing, then procrastination begins to fell less like a bad habit and more like a smart strategy all around.