In Praise of Sleeping Late

“Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” is an axiom that I grew up hearing almost everyday. My father always went to bed by 9.15pm after hearing the English news on AIR and got up at the crack of dawn. Poor man struggled with a variety of health problems before he went into his early eternal sleep, was never really wealthy though he was wise. Not only my father but many of my friends and their parents believed in this adage but did not really benefit. I am a night bird and this saying bugged me all my life. First as a school child, as a college girl and later as a mother and a working woman. I did get up early though I could never manage to go to bed early with the diverse household tasks that had to be completed before I retired to bed.

Now that my children are grown up and flown away from the nest and I have been superannuated, I decided that I would go to bed late and get up late. The first morning that I snuggled deeper into the bed, my husband came and touched my forehead and asked very solicitously “Are you having fever?”  After two or three days of conditioning him I was comfortably lost in the limbo of half sleep- half wakefulness when the phone rang shrilly. My husband did pick it up but later when I returned the call, my aunt  said,” What is this Suguna, sleeping late like that? Don’t you know that it is inauspicious for a woman to be in bed after sunrise?”   On top of it all the self-help gurus from Robin Sharma to Shiv Khera advocate getting up early as an antidote to all the ills of the world. I found myself making excuses for getting up late while talking to my former Principal .It was finally my daughter who made me realize that I had no reason to feel guilty about getting up late if I felt like it. I realized that the societal inhibitions, taboos and customs were mainly responsible for my guilt feelings.

The wise saying was meant for a time when there was no electricity and people depended upon natural sunlight. In this day and age of technological advances it has no meaning for night owls like me. I am able to get as much done in the calmness and disturbance free nights as another person at dawn. There are studies to show that the urban Indians manage with less sleep because they go to bed later and later due to various reasons like commuting, work pressure, socializing and others. So it is perfecting justifiable to sleep late as long as it does not affect others.

Hurrah! I now sleep late with a clear conscience and find that I am more productive.