I Moved Away From Civilization For a Week
And I learned that happiness is in simplicity.
A few days back, I checked out of my apartment hotel and hailed a cab to drive me to Peredelkino — an old ‘dacha’ place for Soviet writers, near Moscow. Pasternak, who won the Noble Prize for Literature, lived here. So did many other famous Russian artists, writers, musicians, composers.
I rented a small cabin, the size of my family’s living room alone, in the woods, away from civilization. My personal Walden.
But I had trouble sleeping the first night. First-night anxiety, I guess. I tried distracting myself with all sorts of things that usually help: guided meditation recordings, writing down thoughts, reading fiction, reading non-fiction, texting, thinking, counting backward from 1000 (I usually fall asleep somewhere at 940, this time, I gave up trying at 860), what have you. I wanted to fall asleep earlier — i.e., at 10–11 PM and wake up at 6–7 AM.
As they say, “Man plans, God laughs.” I ended up falling asleep well after 2 AM and woke up around 9 AM, getting seven hours of low-quality, anxious sleep.
Perhaps that’s the real problem: expecting too much. We (read: I) expect too much of myself. I want to live a certain way (e.g., wake up at a certain time and go to bed at a certain time), and…
