Perfect Dark Room

Dark. Good dark. The kind your body has been waiting for.

The dark of a room where everything light has found its way out or been blocked. Not frightening dark. Not vast dark. The contained, warm, friendly dark of a room built for sleeping. The dark that is the body's oldest signal: this is time for restoration.

Close your eyes. But keep the darkness. The darkness behind closed eyes is different from the darkness of the room. The room is externally dark. Behind your eyes is the interior dark, the personal dark, the space where what happens next happens.

Let the room's dark and your own dark merge. The body in its room, the mind in its own space, both dark, both at the right temperature, both ready.

Notice the pressure of the pillow. The weight of whatever is covering you. These pressures are gentle. They say: surface contact is maintained. You are landed. You are contained. The bed knows where you are.

The darkness is doing its work. Even now, in the dark, the body is adjusting. Melatonin rising in the bloodstream. The deep structures of the brain beginning to shift their activity toward rest mode. The temperature of the body beginning its night cycle. The heart rate dropping. The breath slowing. All of this happening without your management. The dark is the signal the body needed. You provided it.

Let the room be its size in the dark. Not trying to fill it. The dark has a spatial quality, the room is around you without you needing to see it. The familiar coordinates of your room in the dark, which you know without looking: the distance to the door, to the window, to the other side of the bed if there is one. The dark map of the space that you carry in your body.

The sounds of the dark room. Whatever they are. Outside sounds, reduced by night. Inside sounds, the building's quiet conversation. None of them requiring response. All of them evidence that the world is continuing without your input, which means you can stop inputting for a few hours.

You are allowed to stop now. The permissions are all in place. Everything that needed to be done today was done or remains until tomorrow in the unchanged condition in which you left it, which means more time with it tonight will not improve it. The night has no jurisdiction over tomorrow's problems.

Dark. Warm. Still.

The body knows what to do from here. It has done this before. It does it every time given the right conditions. You have provided the right conditions.

The rest is the body's work.

Let it work.

Dark.

Still.

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