Purpose, Purpose, Purpose

     It's been a long day. You know the kind. A day full of back to back appointments, countless people to please, and a list of To Do's that seems to double each time you turn your back. A day of last minute homework assignments scribbled before the bell, of hurried cafeteria lunches spent catching up on a weekends worth of news, and of that English test you forgot about on the book you never bothered to read anyways. Or it's an entire day spent with nothing to do. Of sleeping in, ice cream and pizza and chocolate, and more episodes of your favorite T.V. show than you'd be willing to admit. A day filled with ideas for progress and possibilities that go largely ignored because, after all, that would require work and if your oversized, flannel pajama pants are any indication, none of that is getting done today.
     Whichever way -or combination of ways- that you chose to spend your day, whether it will go down in your book as a successful 24 hours, and despite how it has left you emotionally, one thing is evident -you are exhausted. So you slip in to bed and turn off the lights, relieved that the day is over and it is finally time to rest. Only it's not that simple. The longer you lay there sinking into the cool of your pillow and trying to will yourself to sleep, the clearer it becomes. You may have been able to wash away the physical mementos of your day -the makeup, the sweat, the dirt- but there is something that you seem unable to shake. Something from your day -a particular sight, exchange, or feeling perhaps- returns to your mind, demanding that it be felt and explored and considered. It is in this moment of recollection that you realize that sleep -at least for the time being- is not an option and choose instead to face whatever pressing idea has filled your mind.
     For this brief period, you sit in the quiet and think. Half-asleep and patrolled by a looser sense of practicality, your mind is free to wander and concentrate as and where it wishes. Depending on the night and the catalyst, this leads you in wildly different directions. You take a hard look at your life and decide that you are not all that you would like to be, that you had hoped to be by this time and mile in your journey. You vow to be a better person; to eat better, be kinder, read more, exercise...maybe. Or you decide that you're pretty decent after all and set high and noble goals because in the solitude of your moment, with no one to tell you otherwise, you feel that you can do anything. And maybe you can. Or maybe your mind went in a different route altogether -introspection is not everyone's thing. You decided to tackle a certain issue instead, a problem that you have perceived in the world around you. It might be a global conundrum -a topic of political debates and blog posts worldwide- or something from the world around you -an issue with the way something is handled, a challenge in the life of a friend, a problem that while smaller in scale is of no less importance to you. It might not even be problematic, just something in your life or your day that continues to hold captive your attention. As you ponder it, you begin to realize a great many things about the world around you, evaluate your place within it, or problem solve until you remedy the troubling situation -at least in your mind.
     By the end of this period, you have progressed through a myriad of possible emotions and stages. You have experienced moments of extreme passion, thoughtfulness, inadequacy, contentment, depression, clarity. However, sometime between the making of your midnight vows and ideas and your waking up the next morning, you lose a measure of these. It is almost as if the feelings or even the ideas themselves snuck away as you drifted -finally- to sleep and remain just out of your reach. You forget little by little the keenness of your sense of perception and the tangibility of your ideas and the intensity of your personal call to action. By the time your morning shower is over and you begin the search for acceptable clothing and breakfast options, you have put the late night musing away almost completely, storing it away somewhere deep within your brain in order to make room for the flood of new thoughts and feelings that the coming day will bring. You leave it there until something else in your life brushes off the dirt and requires you to re-examine it once again.
     This happens to me time and time again often because the late, quiet hours of the night seem to be the only times to think. Following the craziness and business of a full day, they are a welcome relief and a time to reorient myself. However, the ideas rarely survive into the daylight hours. Days are full, energy is in limited supply, and there are  not enough hours to see everything that has been pondered or decided in the night through to fruition. It is simply not possible. And so my midnight monologues become just that -monologues, a collection of pretty -or not so pretty- words that never move beyond the quiet darkness of my room. That being said, this is my way of documenting those, of being able to remember my ideas -the ones that seem to be so pressing and urgent and interesting- long after I've awoken and moved on. It's to hoping that even those that may never transform themselves to action can serve to inspire or convict me -and possibly you- in the days to come.