Too late to stay up, Too early to get up

It's almost 1 a.m. and I'm not quite ready to sleep. As much as I love sleep, I must admit it is a bit overrated. Rest, repose, restoration, relaxation and recreation even, but sleep? It's sooooo passive. Almost like it's not really something you do, but something that happens to you. Or perhaps it's something you don't do.
Like when people ask, "Are you growing a beard?"
"No, I'm just not shaving."

"Are you sleeping?"
"No, I'm just not awake."

Why are there different modes of awakeness? Is consciousness always aware? What if there's less to be aware of? (Like at 1 a.m. when all is quiet in my house.)
Funny thing - I feel more aware when there's less going on.

I remember meeting this guy who had ridden a horse coast to coast, from Lincoln City to Atlantic City. He said that it tool a few days before his mind stopped running through all kinds of thoughts, tumbling its contents around. He said somewhere out in Wyoming he began to be completely in the now, in the moment. All he was aware of at that time was the rhythm of the horse, the heat rising off the road, an occasional lizard crossing his path.

That spoke to me. I wanted to be like that. Rich Mullins says that living "in time" means that we cannot see what's ahead and cannot get free from what we've left behind. I just want to be, to live as a human being, not a human "doing."

Campolo refers to "Now" as the non-existent point (a point has no duration) which separates the past from the future. Yet now is the only part of time we have direct experience of. The past is a memory, the future is a vision, we have only the "eternal now." Eternal because it offers us a window into timelessness. We share a moment, perhaps an "I-Thou" moment, and it doesn't matter how long or short. There is a connection in the now and in our conscious experience. It didn't "happen" in time and yet no one can take it away from us and nothing is more certain than our apprehension of another being and what we have shared.

In sleep we are not aware of the passage of time. But this is no excape. To be aware yet not "in time" is an acquired skill. We can waste time, spend time, lose time and find time, but can we set it aside, knowing it will be there? To rest, to restore, to relax and re-create involve taking time, perhaps even making time, just for being.

Here I am, ready to sleep, staying awake.
Body at rest, mind still up, searching cerebral space.
Ideas find places, feelings find words.
Pace slowly slackens, pulse remains regular.
Breath falls and rises, eyes calmly close.
Last thing to stop moving through mental landscapes . . .
is a vehicle called thought.
Until tomorrow.