I was playing with my daughter late last night, a little too past her bedtime and a little too unneeded for the time, while my wife sitting besides me getting super annoyed keeping up with our mischief and this fooling around at an inappropriate hour.
I tend to enjoy the last few minutes of the day with her, tickling her, hear stories of the day, any new observations or learnings, any slips through the crack, that kinda stuff.

She did really need to go to sleep, it is school next day. If you have kids, or remember how it was being one, sleep is the last thing you want to do voluntarily. I particularly never enjoyed syncing into it or being told to. Always trying to squeeze in an extra few minutes or find ways to cash in on an excuse or simply stare at the fan. Just about anything but that useless chore.

When my daughter does that I am not the least bit surprised. But something interesting happened yesterday while we were at the routine. It has been a while since she had her last rather exciting pandemic style play-date (nearly 2 months), one she is always looking forward to. The neighbour’s grand-daughter makes an occasional trip to her Nana house, and here was my daughter on the extra energy after a long eve, where I would expect her to come home and just crash, but quite the opposite.

She did return home extremely tired, in no sense of doing anything just about right, a Monday eve too. I could see that. The worn out eyes, washed out face, droopy and sloppy all through. But still there was this extra layer of energy which could spiral her back into another play date. Don’t we all have that kinda extra energy for the things we love? We just seem to scoop that right out of a completely run down system. Well that’s not what the surprising part was.

My wife and I had kept trying for a good forty-five minutes to dampen the spirit. Clearly kids have a different kind of atomic build up. We had nearly tried all easy access ways– stories, pillow talk, tickles, strictness, in vain. She would keep tossing, playing, expecting more from the situation. My wife and I looked at each other, we just knew this was exhausting.

And then I did the experiment. I thought what if there was a way through sheer force of plain muscle to burn out the extra energy? Is it too dark to try? Like all inquisitive experiments. Give it a shot.

With all that extra pre-sleep effort, I cuddled with her super-tight, in a way she wasn’t allowed to move much other than bask in my hundred kisses on baby-lotion smelling cheeks. She kept laughing and I thought I was making a fool out of myself. She initially struggled to come out of the trap, tried to push her way out, I could feel those tiny muscles working their way through this giant trap of heavy skeleton artillery and when she couldn’t in less than a minute, ruffled her hair, set her head well on the pillow and off she went to sleep.

Wait, what?

That’s it? This easy?

No way a problem this hard that needed atleast an hour to figure out could be leveraged with only bigger muscles? It appears small when I write this but a minute vs. an hour’s effort is really a leverage hacked system. Operation tight-cuddle with conducive results!

Well, this made me think if we grown-ups too are the same way?

I notice how a lot of us work hard and struggle for things we want, the things we strive for, desire and sure are willing to put in the extra hours and despite all that things don’t work out and we fail. Somehow there doesn’t seem any direct correlation to effort and reward in some cases. If anything the inverse were probably true equally.

We’ve all seen it range from businesses to relationships, parenting, startups, personal finances, investments and anything really.

But there always is this extra energy that makes us do things even in the darkest of hours. When we think of those times we can’t seem to reason with it, or come to terms with the demand it has, sometimes months and years into it with the spirit refusing to give up. In hindsight you might ask yourself why exactly was I doing it in the first place?

Especially when it comes to relationships, but we really do want it to work out. I want to call that as the extra energy we are innately blessed with. It creates a new kind of momentum when all things seem to be failing around.

And them comes the bigger hit.

A force bigger than all those little bumps being faced, an energy bigger than all those previously combined strikes and we are hit hard. A real final blow as though the universe is telling you lets see your tiny muscles now. This really puts out the last light. And break into pieces we do.

The force of a magnitude has to be atleast 3-4 times bigger than what we could endure and now this seems like a battle we’ve lost. It’s only then do we really give up on the things we love and were working hard towards for a really long time. This ones a blow at the spirit. The final tug into the pit.

If we can recognise that we might just be able to understand it’s onset, or know when are we entering a state of total exhaustion, vulnerable to the attacks of the extra heavy energy, prepare, maybe take a break, maybe completely abandon the work for a few days and gather the “self” and come back at it in a not-so-exhausted way.

Maybe in the morning my daughter could’ve fought me better and braver for another few hours.

Ali