A nap on a too-short couch
A record of thoughts from mid-December 2023:
Today I took a nap. It took a while to fall asleep, but it was the kind of day when I had plenty of time for that (given that I am committed to ignoring my pre-holiday to-do list), and there was nothing I was as eager for as I was to be my post-nap self, a person I know for her capability, attention, and reasonableness. She’s entirely different from my pre-nap self, and she was the person I required for the rest of the day.
I went to sleep with the kernel of this plot in my head—my long, long-simmering 2023 goal of “getting back online”—and woke up without having progressed further in the plot (I have been known to find solutions, compose short drafts, or hatch ideas in my sleep, but never to progress an already-developing plan—logistics are not my sleeping mind’s specialty).
But when I woke up, my legs tucked up close to me on the couch, I remembered how a teacher of mine, one of my most important models for being a thinking person in the world and a figure I often unconsciously surface in my mind, once asked us to think of some simple pleasures to share. This might have been for a creative writing class, but that isn’t the room I remember it in—I see a living-room-turned-library-turned-classroom, a space that had been re-fitted in the time I was there to accommodate the needs of the growing school. His own example was taking a nap on a too-short couch. Being a little forced to curl up…
{here the pen I was writing with ran out of ink, so what follows is my reconstruction of the thought}
…, as I reflected now, might have been the only time he would ever do so. I, on the other hand, curl up to some degree in most chairs I sit in. Most chairs, for one thing, are too tall for me to sit comfortably with my feet on the ground, so I tend to tuck my legs up under me preemptively to avoid loss of circulation. I doubt he had this problem.
But so far I’m only discussing the situations in which a short or a tall person might find themself forced to curl up a bit. Curling up is also elective for me, for gendered reasons, and available to me in many situations. No one looks askance if I curl myself up, on a couch, on a chair, on a bed, on the floor with my child. The fetal position is famously comforting, and it suddenly occurred to me, on this revisitation of that exercise in class two decades ago, that sleeping on a too-short couch might have been so especially pleasurable for him because it was, perhaps, his only opportunity as a grown and bearded man to curl up in a childish way.
Open Question: Is it worthwhile for me to continue to consider the role of scarcity in the construction of pleasure? Or will I begin to irritate myself by doing so, since I have a tendency to feel that any pleasure is spoiled by too much commentary on its rarity or its other good qualities? Perhaps pursuing it as a line of inquiry will help me to inoculate myself against this tendency?
