BENGALURU: As a teenager, I read a self-help book that spoke about the habits of effective people. There were a number of life-lessons in it, but I never understood what ‘effective’ meant. Did it mean those who effectively put in their best at work? Or those who managed to get by life in the most effective manner?
If it was the latter, Mr Stephen Covey should have added another category of people to this list of effective elites – those who sleep in the day. The joy of sleeping in the afternoon hasn’t been written about enough. Most of us day-sleepers are looked down upon by the world, we are asked if we get bored. Society is becoming increasingly intolerant to our kind.
A lot of people claim to be day-dreamers but a select few are day-sleepers. These are people who live their life on their own philosophy – not one borrowed by philosophers from the West. They have decided to let life pass by them, to let the herds rush to their watering holes – as they bask in the comfort of their natural habitat.
A nice, sound nap in the afternoon is also of assistance when you want to drown out the madness of the day. Let’s face it, living can be problematic. Everyday life is a jigsaw of a thousand, chaotic, small requirements. Just surviving requires you to interact, to understand, to explain, to negotiate, to imbibe, decode and transfer.But take a nap in the afternoon and like an invisible blanket - everything fades out into a quiet, calming silence. The noise, the chaos, the need to understand and be understood – all of them float out of your body like smooth, smoky fumes. You wake up purged, pure. Like a monk after hours of meditation.
Most people are worried about ‘waking up on the wrong side’ of the bed. Day-sleepers have no such issues. If your day had a bad beginning, you can quickly go to sleep and reset it. Day-sleeping allows you to make minor time-travel corrections to your day.
We are unaffected by the trivialities of weather and traffic. We are unaffected by storms and cyclones — the last time I stepped out of my house in the day was during an earthquake scare. As a stand-up comedian, most of my work happens at night and I’m fresh as a daisy when my turn comes.
However, all is not rosy at our end. I have noticed that our numbers are quickly dwindling. Back in my childhood, nearly all the adults I knew would take a nap in the afternoon. I find that is no more the case, as the cut-throat competition of today’s world requires one to stay awake in the day. Like leopards and orangutans, the breed of day-sleepers is quickly slipping into extinction.
If you happen to meet or know a day-sleeper, please be nice to them. Please take down their number and remember never to call them during the day. If something really urgent comes up, send them a post-card through IndiaPost.
If I’d had the fortune of meeting Mr Stephen Covey, I would humbly ask him to add another habit among those followed by highly effective people. For we are people who have a different outlook of life. What is life, after all, if not the interval between two naps?
The author is a writer and comedian.