24 Hours Is Too Long

I have come to the conclusion that a 24-hour day is simply too long.

I’m not suggesting we abolish it. The rest of the world has found it quite useful for several thousand years. But for me, living with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), it increasingly makes very little sense.

I no longer work. I no longer travel as I once did. I barely move independently. And I certainly don’t sleep very much.

Four hours of sleep is an excellent night for me. Often, it is considerably less.

That leaves up to 20 hours a day to fill.

Twenty hours. Every single day.

And to think I used to complain there weren’t enough hours in the day. Be careful what you wish for.

Work, meetings, family, travel, and community commitments once filled every available hour. I used to wonder where the time went.

Now I sometimes wonder how on earth I am going to get through it.

Apart from Shabbat, there is little distinction between one day and the next. Weekends, bank holidays, even Tuesdays and Thursdays have lost much of their meaning.

There is another irony. I am often at my best late at night, precisely when most of the country is asleep.

At 2 a.m., I can be wide awake and full of creative spirit. Ideas arrive one after another. Sentences I have been chasing all day suddenly fall into place. A thought that seemed hopelessly tangled at lunchtime is suddenly obvious.

And there’s no one awake to share it with.

The house is silent. My family is asleep, as they should be. The ideas that feel so exciting in the dark simply wait for morning.

Except morning doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

During the day, I can be surprisingly alone too. Most people are working, getting on with the busy lives I used to have myself.

I try to sleep, but that isn’t always easy either. As the family’s unofficial courier collector, every delivery seems to come with 20 phone calls attached. Then there are people wanting a donation, my vote, or, much more happily, lovely people checking in on me, whom I actually want to speak to.

The outside world, it turns out, has little respect for my revised sleeping hours.

So I am often awake when everyone else is asleep, interrupted when I try to rest, and exhausted when people are finally around.

My body clock and the rest of the world’s appear to be operating in different time zones.

So I have a proposal.

Let’s shorten the day to eight hours.

Four hours for sleeping. Four hours for doing things.

Three days for every one of yours.

Admittedly, I haven’t thought through the practical implications. Airlines, employers, schools, and my family might have a few objections.

But personally, I rather like the idea.

Of course, perhaps the problem isn’t the length of the day.

Perhaps it’s me.

Maybe I am bored. Maybe I have too much time on my hands. Losing my career and becoming dependent on others has certainly changed my relationship with time.

But here’s the strange thing.

The days can feel endless, while the weeks disappear in an instant.

They say time flies when you’re having fun. It turns out it also flies when you’re not. It just takes a much longer route.

When you’re busy, you barely notice time passing. When you have little to do but watch it, every minute seems determined to take its time. A watched pot never boils. In my case, it’s usually a watched microwave.

Yet suddenly it’s Friday again, another Shabbat is approaching, and I wonder where the week went.

For most of my adult life, I tried to fit as much as possible into every day. My calendar was full, and I liked it that way.

Then my life changed almost beyond recognition.

But my mind didn’t stop wanting to do things.

I still want to write, learn, pray, laugh, talk, and engage with people.

I have more waking hours than I know what to do with, yet less energy to use them than ever before.

So I break life into smaller pieces.

An hour of activity. Some rest. A conversation. Some writing. Some exercise, if I can manage it. More rest.

On a difficult day, even those pieces are too large.

Perhaps I have been looking at this the wrong way.

The problem isn’t really that 24 hours is too long.

It’s that 24 hours is no longer the right unit of measurement for my life.

I can’t live a conventional day anymore. I live an hour here, a conversation there, a little writing when my brain and body happen to cooperate. Then I rest and begin again.

Perhaps I don’t need shorter days after all.

I just need to stop expecting myself to live 24 hours at a time.