Vox Meditantis

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

Wednesday, 26th November 2025

The lamp threw its circle on the desk just as the question arrived, slipping into the evening the way hypotheticals do when they mean to be serious – what would I do with the extra hours if sleep were optional, if the night could be commandeered for ambition or appetite without the body’s veto? Years ago, the answer would have been swift and self-congratulating: more notes, naturally, more articles polished to that pitch of clarity that earns journal space, more grant proposals arguing for programmes the community needs but hasn’t yet named. The old Catherine – or the Catherine I performed so diligently she became habitual – would have colonised midnight with the sort of grim productivity that mistakes exhaustion for virtue, filling every retrieved hour with evidence of her usefulness until the day resembled a military campaign rather than a life.

Tonight, though, the question met a different woman. The one who has booked two nights in Québec City for mid-December, who signed her name to a watercolour timetable, who spent yesterday cataloguing the small tyrannies that make her unreasonably cross and discovered that weaponised busyness topped the list. It turns out that the fantasy of sleeplessness – of more time, more capacity, more hours to spend – sounds less like liberation than like the very cage I’ve been trying to unbolt.

The harbour this evening is holding its November breath, the tide somewhere between arrivals, and the Victorian rooms around me are settling into that particular quiet that precedes winter proper. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, an American occasion I’ve never quite mastered – too much theatre, too much obligation dressed as gratitude – but this year I’ve decided to keep it plainly. David accepted my invitation this afternoon when I finally, belatedly, kept yesterday’s promise and rang him. His yes was immediate and unadorned, the sort that makes you realise you’ve been holding your breath waiting for permission you didn’t need to ask for. No turkey, I warned him. Just something honest. He laughed and said that was the best offer he’d had all week.

Two versions of the night

If sleep were merely optional – if the body didn’t insist on its eight hours of necessary surrender – I can see two Catherines inhabiting the extra time, each one plausible, each one haunted by different inheritances.

The first Catherine stays in the consulting room long after the last patient leaves. Not because there’s urgent work – there rarely is, at this hour – but because an empty office feels safer than an empty flat, because case reports can be polished indefinitely, because there is always one more email that could be answered, one more article that wants reading, one more minor administrative task that justifies remaining at the desk rather than climbing the stairs to rooms that ask nothing of Dr Bennett but insist, quietly, on meeting Catherine. This version would use the midnight hours the way I’ve used so many evenings: as a refuge from the harder work of simply being present to my own life. She would emerge at dawn with tidy files and the particular exhaustion that comes from spending a night fleeing yourself at your own desk.

I know this Catherine intimately. I’ve been her more often than I care to admit – the woman who hides inside competence, who treats busyness as a prophylactic against intimacy, who fills every margin so there’s no room left for the quiet in which actual feeling might surface. Father would have recognised this instinct, the bus driver’s discipline of keeping to the route even when the heart wants to deviate. But he also knew when the day was done, when to come home and sit in his chair with the paper and let the hours simply pass without accounting for them.

The second Catherine – the one I’m learning to be, haltingly and with considerable resistance – would use those midnight hours differently. She might sit at the kitchen table with paints and the cheap paper I bought at Elena’s, practising the sort of marks that teach humility: harbour lines that refuse to behave, the particular green of water after rain, the way light sits on a building at four o’clock as my mother once noted in margins I only recently found. Not to produce anything exhibitable, but to remember what it feels like to be a beginner, to attempt something badly and survive the exposure.

Or she might sit at the piano in the Methodist church hall – David mentioned last month that he has a key, that the instrument wants more hands than Sunday services provide – and work through the Bach partita he’s been gently, persistently suggesting I might enjoy. I played reasonably well once, decades ago, before psychiatry consumed the hours that music requires. The thought of sitting beside him in that cold hall at midnight, working through passages with the patience of people who have nothing to prove and nowhere else to be, sounds like a different species of ambition entirely. Not the sort that accrues credentials, but the sort that accrues presence.

Or – and this is the image that arrived most insistently tonight – she might simply sit in the Victorian parlour downstairs, the one I pass through daily on my way to the consulting room but never actually inhabit. It has good chairs, tall windows that overlook the street, a fireplace that hasn’t been lit in years because I’ve never felt I had time to justify the ritual. In the extra hours, I might sit there and do nothing discernibly useful. Read without purpose. Think without reaching for the notebook. Let the room teach me what it knows about stillness, about the radical act of occupying space without immediately converting it to productivity.

Mother would have filled those hours with people – midnight suppers that turned into impromptu gatherings, the sort of exuberant sociability that made our childhood home feel like the town flowed through it rather than around it. I don’t have her gift for turning time into carnival, but I’m beginning to suspect I’ve overcorrected, mistaking solitude for wisdom when sometimes it’s just another form of defence.

What the real work is

The thought experiment clarifies what I’ve been circling around since yesterday’s entry about pet peeves and promises: my real work now is not cramming more achievement into the day. It’s learning to tolerate what I once dismissed as “unproductive” presence – the hours in which nothing measurable happens, in which I am simply here, in my own life, without the protective carapace of professional purpose.

This feels particularly urgent tonight, on the eve of Thanksgiving, a holiday designed to foreground gratitude and togetherness – two things I can advocate for clinically but struggle to practise domestically. In past years, I’ve either worked through the day, treating it as Thursday with better lighting, or I’ve engineered elaborate meals that kept me so busy in the kitchen I never actually had to sit at the table and feel what the occasion asks you to feel.

This year, I’m choosing differently. I’ve prepared simple things – a roast that Father would approve of for its plainness, a risotto that carries Mother’s handwriting even if my execution is merely competent, bread from Elena’s rather than anything heroic from my own oven. The menu is deliberately modest, built for a table where conversation matters more than spectacle, where two people can sit without the meal itself becoming a performance that prevents actual presence.

The guest room boxes still wait upstairs, mid-excavation. The Victorian radiators will clank their seasonal complaint. The watercolour attempts are visible on the sideboard, evidence of recent, public fumbling. I’m not hiding any of it. This is the bargain I’m making with myself: if I can’t have more hours, at least I can inhabit the ones I have more honestly.

This morning, before the nerve could desert me, I also emailed Michael and Linda. Not the carefully crafted invitation I’d been composing mentally for weeks – full of contingencies and apologies and elaborate reassurances – but something plainer: The first weekend in December, if you’re free. The sixth and seventh. Guest room’s ready enough, radiators are honest about their limitations, and I’ll make the sort of food that says you’re welcome without requiring me to pretend I’m someone else. Let me know.

Linda replied within the hour: We’d love to. Bring anything? M says to tell you the radiators can’t be worse than his car heater. I felt the small shock of relief that comes when you risk ordinary honesty and it’s met with ordinary warmth. No performance required, just the table set and the door opened.

What tomorrow will be

Tomorrow, David will arrive at whatever time we agreed to – I’ve already forgotten, which seems a good sign that I’m not treating this like a clinical appointment requiring rigorous scheduling – and we’ll navigate the slightly awkward choreography of a meal that’s more than friendly but not yet defined as anything else. We’ll eat food that tastes like inheritance without tasting like ambition. We’ll probably do the dishes together, which still feels like the most intimate domestic act I can imagine – someone else’s hands in my kitchen’s rhythms, the quiet conspiracy of drying while the other washes.

If there are silences, I won’t rush to fill them. If the roast and risotto are merely adequate rather than magnificent, I’ll let it be adequate. If I feel the weight of what I’m attempting – letting someone see the actual rooms I live in, not just the ones I show – I’ll try not to make that his problem to solve. The evening will be what it is: two people choosing presence over adjacency, domesticity over the safer territories of concerts and museums, the risk of being seen in the kitchen rather than the auditorium.

The Québec arrangements are nearly settled now – flights booked this afternoon between patients, the train from the airport confirmed, the small logistics that turn a hotel reservation into an actual journey. Friday the twelfth to Sunday the fourteenth, mid-December when the city will be dressed for winter and I’ll be alone in a place that knows nothing of Dr Bennett and asks nothing of Catherine beyond showing up and paying attention. It feels like the other half of tomorrow’s experiment: if I can practise domestic presence with David, perhaps I can also practise solitary presence in a city that speaks a different language, where anonymity is a gift rather than a loneliness.

The choice to go to bed

It’s nearly ten now, and the harbour has finished its evening protocols. Tom’s light went out twenty minutes ago – I can see his house from here, three doors down, the porch bulb that clicks off at 2145 with the regularity of a secular vespers. Somewhere upstairs, the bed is waiting with its plain linens and its nightly invitation to stop. To surrender the day. To let the body do its necessary work of restoration without my supervision or my productivity agenda hovering over it.

If I didn’t need sleep – if those eight hours could be redeemed for something that looked more like achievement – I’d squander them the way I’ve squandered so many evenings: filling time with tasks that feel urgent precisely because they prevent me from feeling anything else. The case notes, the emails, the administrative work that expands to fill whatever space I give it. The performance of indispensability that keeps me safe from the question of what my life would look like if I stopped performing long enough to actually live it.

So tonight, on the eve of a holiday that asks for gratitude and the domestic bravery of setting a table for more than one, I’m choosing to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Not because there isn’t work I could do – there’s always work – but because the work that matters now is showing up tomorrow rested enough to be present. To let the meal be a meal. To let David be David, and myself be Catherine, without the scripts and the schedules and the carefully managed margins that keep everything feeling safe and nothing feeling real.

The extra hours, if I had them, would probably destroy me. Or at least destroy the person I’m trying to become: someone who can tolerate presence without armour, who can sit in her own parlour without immediately justifying it, who can paint badly and practise Bach and invite people to tables that aren’t perfect because perfect is just another word for defended.

The lamp is guttering now – I should replace the bulb, add it to the list of small domestic kindnesses I keep meaning to show myself – and the flat has that particular stillness that says the day is finished whether I agree or not. Tomorrow will come with its plain roast and its honest risotto, with David’s arrival and whatever we make of the hours we give each other. The weekend after next will come with Michael and Linda’s visit, with family at the table and the radiators clanking their seasonal commentary. And mid-December will come with Québec waiting, with two nights in a city I’ve never seen, with the risk and the gift of being nobody in particular in a place that asks nothing of me except attention.

Enough, then. The hours I have are sufficient, if I can learn to inhabit them without fleeing into the next task, the next obligation, the next opportunity to prove my usefulness instead of simply resting in my presence. The bed is waiting. Tomorrow is waiting. The people I’ve invited into my actual life – not the professional one, but the one that happens in kitchens and parlours and the small hours when sleep does its necessary work of letting us begin again – are waiting.

I’m learning, slowly and with all the grace of someone who spent fifty-eight years avoiding this particular lesson, that the most radical thing I can do is not to fill time but to inhabit it. To let the evening end. To trust that tomorrow will come and I’ll be rested enough to meet it. To believe that presence – unheroic, unproductive, simply human presence – might be enough.

The light is off. The harbour is dark. And I am going, finally, to bed.

Catherine

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.