Every night, we surrender the world without signing a receipt.
One moment we are negotiating with tomorrow. Then the room disappears.
Sleep is not simple emptiness. The sleeping brain remains active, moving through different states. Conscious experience may vanish, fragment or become the strange cinema of dreams.
Yet our ordinary sense of duration loosens. We close our eyes at midnight and wake as though six hours were quietly removed from the manuscript.
Sleep does not stop time.
It temporarily removes us from narrating it.
Death is not merely deeper sleep. Biology does not confuse the two, and faith does not make death trivial. But the metaphor survives because both confront the ego with absence.
In sleep, morning usually returns us to the world we left pending. The messages remain unread. The problem waits beside the bed with admirable discipline.
In death, the pending world continues without us.
The clock is remarkably unemotional.
This is why mortality should not be reduced to a productivity coach shouting that we must hustle harder. A person can fill every hour and still be absent from his own life.
Mortality is a harsher editor. It asks what deserves finite attention.
Psalm 90 does not ask God to help us cram more activity into the calendar. It asks Him to teach us to number our days so that we may gain wisdom.
Numbering is not panic. It is spiritual accounting.
Not every urgent thing is important. Not every delay is harmless. Not every ambition deserves ten years. Not every quarrel should be allowed to eat another afternoon.
Our nightly disappearance should humble us. Consciousness is not a switch permanently obedient to our fingers. Time is not property merely because we own a watch.
Sleep reminds us that we can temporarily leave the story.
Death reminds us that one day, temporary will no longer be ours to promise.
Perhaps wisdom is not squeezing every drop from life.
It is knowing what deserves the hours in which we are awake.
Abraham Ikongshul Ashindortiang
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