I think one of the reasons that the success rate in music goes down as people age is that after you turn 30 - no one wants to go out very late.
I certainly run into this all the time with local open mics starting between 8 or 9 o'clock, ON A SCHOOL NIGHT. It's pretty damn hard to get out of the house after you've taken off your work shoes, doubly so this time of year when the air has been custom-built to freeze-dry your lungs.
But I've come across a great life hack for this situation, the Disco Nap. Rhonda was the one who gave me the name of this practice. Something coming out of the rave/EDM culture. The idea is pretty simple: come home from work, eat your supper, do your evening things, then take 20 minutes aside and have a nap. Even shorter works, I've got by on 10-minute and 15-minute disco naps too. You wake up with just the right amount of oomph to get you out to that 8:00 boogie session, but didn't go down hard enough that you can't sleep until 4 am.
Last week I had a pretty intense disco nap.
I've been trying out the Calm app for a few weeks now. It's a meditation and mindfulness tool with a bunch of materials to help you find calm, sleep, etc. I had heard that SaskTel was giving away free 1-year subscriptions, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. This kind of stuff has been one of the self-care things I've been missing, so what's the risk, right?
Normally, I just do the 10-minute morning meditation before going to work, but last Wednesday, I figured I could put it on as my timer and focus for my disco-nap ahead of going to Bushwakker for the folk night show a few of my friends were playing at.
Looking through the 15-minute-long meditations, I found one on forgiveness. For some reason, last week I'd been thinking a lot about the role of forgiveness in the modern world. Do we need more forgiveness? Is misplaced forgiveness what's put us in some of the negative places we're in lately? What role should forgiveness play in my life?
Normally, when I'm curious about something like this, I'd read an article or Wikipedia about it. But I thought this time, let's meditate on forgiveness. And holy man, did it take me places that night.
I didn't go into that meditation thinking I needed forgiveness or needed to grant forgiveness. But that meditation took me down to some actually kind of dark places, then slowly worked me back up with some ways to bring forgiveness and happiness in. Totally unexpected but very, very welcome to be sure!
I rose from the meditation a bit stunned and full of thought, not just about forgiveness but how powerfully that meditation had affected me. In the couple of weeks I've been doing the meditation regularly, I've noticed a few little things. Getting on the bus in the morning feels a bit more detached and centred in a healthy way. My thoughts seem to have less static or bad tuning. They seem smoother. But nothing quite so overt as this.
It's taken me a long time to find something to fill this particular bucket in my life. As much as we all hear the term "self-care" and how important that is, it's not easy to find. Each of us has our own needs in that regard, and the whole world we live in is so toxic - it can be hard to find all the things one needs. I think one of the benefits of reading all the self-help books I have this year is that I've started to see the patterns and the repeating things that we all need. Spirituality and mindfulness are a big one, and if you're in pursuit of that, I'd suggest giving Calm a try. If Calm isn't in your budget, find some meditation videos on YouTube or grab a book from the library on it. Or just fold laundry in silence for a while. You might be surprised what you find.














