Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Reboot

It's been more than half a year since my last post. I have such a myriad of thoughts that I am not sure where to start. That is, I feel I have a lot to write, and that is why I am writing... yet no particular purpose to write except that I feel that I should.

It has been more than two months since I sold the shop, and since then life has been in a sort of limbo. A month of relaxation in Canberra, another month of idleness in Auckland, a few days in Sydney, and now here I am. It all seems a bit surreal, as if my life were a portrait and I had now stepped out of the picture frame and perused it upon a wall.

Auckland was wet, I had no car, and not much desire to do much... and thus, the majority of the time was spent at 'home', eating, watching tv, playing computer games. I only really went out to help at my parents' shop and incidentally wandered through the CBD (since that is where the shop is). Fortunately the last few days were relatively fair weathered and I was able to take my siblings out for a few days.

I used to call Auckland 'home'... and I guess I'll continue to do so while my family lives there, but I feel distant now while there. I have lost touch will all my high school friends, though I did meet a few of my relatives. It's been nearly a decade since I left NZ, and left the home of my parents. The independence means returning and fitting into the lifestyle of a family again feels at times inhibiting, at other times a relief (from having sole responsibility of 'looking after myself'). Along with not having my own room and no real purpose to my day-to-day activities, this created a feeling of remoteness that is still with me as I write this in Canberra. Life has been suspended.

And then there were the dreams. In recent times I have been relatively dreamless... if I dreamed, I rarely remembered in the morning. While I had the shop, one of the few benefits of living an extremely busy and tiring life was that when it came time to sleep, my body would shut down very quickly and seemingly made best use of my reduced sleeping hours by entering deep and dreamless sleep. Now, in NZ, I had plenty of time to sleep. My brother would sleep at 10.30pm (my parents even earlier for the shop), and as I stayed in his room, I would sleep at the Canberra equivalent of 8.30pm! At first I would wake up late in the morning after almost half a day of sleep, but after several days of this I adjusted to the time difference and stopped oversleeping.

You would think that so much sleep would make you feel energised right? Wrong, in my case for several reasons. One, the bed was not my own and was far too soft (i.e. lacked support). Two, I had been inactive for too long (i.e. a sedentary lifestyle). And three, I no longer had tiredness shut down the mind when it came time to sleep (i.e. it was harder to fall asleep because I was well rested and my mind would still be churning through thoughts). The consequence was less efficient sleep plagued by dreams.

Well, more random thoughts later.