Auto Pilot Sleepy Brain

Sleepiness befuddles me in such a pleasing way sometimes. There's a clarity in the fuzz of it. A peculiar force like a guiding tunnel. If I am tired, and going to bed soon, I can be so singularly devoted to completing one particular task. I assume this is my body urging me towards sleep by working to be attentive to whatever it is I am refusing to postpone until after I have gone to bed and had a weird dream and woken up. I appreciate it, but I also feel a bit mean. I have to push myself sometimes, but I feel like two segments of a body - one who is making the other do stuff for no reason. I'm sorry, body.

But that made me think of how we discover and decide what's important to us, and what to work on at any one time. How do I decide whether to make a sandwich or put my washing away first? Or on a grander scale, how we order the big priorities in our lives? How do we decide to divide up our time? How do we choose our commitments? I know there's a lot of things we fall into, individually. I also know there's a lot of things, a lot of modes of being, that are expectations we're brought up with. We might devote a lot of time and energy to things we feel we ought to do, or to things that are a means to an end (when the end is the thing we really want).

It's hard to hold all these considerations in my head at once and understand what is right about my choices and trajectories. That's why, I guess, I like the auto-pilot brain of my tired self. My "hurry up and go to bed" self. That self has no time to think about it. On the other hand, I have to think about it. I have to try to know if I'm doing the right stuff. If I'm dividing myself in a way that makes sense. I worry that I'm just giving energy to the wrong things sometimes. But maybe it's all a false sense of gravity. Maybe the sleep brain is the best brain. Maybe I should trust in my body's auto pilot. I don't know what's best.