Happy Sleep

This post isn't really about the philosophy I've talked with Helena Iara.  In fact, it's much more about me (One could argue, with good evidence, that one could say this about every post on this blog, but I'll leave issues of projection for another day).

I've always seen myself, and probably correctly, as a happy person, and I've long wanted to attribute this fact to a certain reflexivity, perhaps even a philosophical orientation, in my character.  When things get tough, I can think through them, analyze them, criticize myself, and come out happy again.

Unfortunately, over the last year, philosophy hasn't saved me from the occasional black moods, emotions that have always seemed very foreign to who I am.  As is obvious from these posts, I have often been very happy with Helena and with Rita, but from time to time, a kind of sadness and irritability has passed over me, something I feel powerless to stop and change.

Over these months, I have spent time and effort trying to understand this emotional blackness, testing hypothesis after hypothesis in a kind of spiritual scientific method, but without any success.  I think, however, that I may have come to some kind of a conclusion.  It all has to do with sleep.

I had always attributed my better than average happiness to my better-than-average capacity to reflect and philosophize, so one can understand that I would be a bit disappointed to find that the real cause could be something much more jejune: the fact that I sleep 9 hours most nights.  Or more accurately, slept.  You can't keep that up with a baby in the house.  Sleeping less, I have found myself exhausted, unable to keep up the happiness that I always found so easy.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that happiness is organic, a form of energy not that much different from the ability to run a marathon or climb a 20,000 foot mountain.  I couldn't do either of those without sleep either.  But ever since Aristotle declared that the purpose of philosophy was to seek felicity, thinkers have claimed that their way of seeing their world, their techniques of reflecting on themselves -- all of philosophy, in fact -- would serve as the royal road to happiness.

Helena slept almost 18 hours today, and she can't stop smiling.  Maybe we really just need more sleep.