One of the best aids to cheerfulness is sound, refreshing sleep.
If we should put off all worrying until the morning, there would be very little worrying done by the normal, healthy person, for, after a good night's sleep and in the clear light of day, things look much better than they did in the darkness and solitude of the night, with mind and body worn from the activities of the day.
If we feel that our affairs are too important, then at least we may wait until morning to give our attention to them.
It is unfair to bring exhausted faculties to bear upon matters of so great weight.
If our troubles can be helped by worrying, we should worry when we are in the best possible trim.
To do less were to underestimate their importance and to prove that, anyway, they are not worth losing sleep over.
But there is still another way of looking at wakefulness, when we cannot trace the cause of it.
It may be the time sent to us by the spirit for quiet thought.
The ancients believed that God spoke in visions of the night.
We may not always be able to sleep, but we can always lie in the arms of our great mother nature.
There is a real philosophy as well as devotion in the old prayer we teach our children, " Now I lay me down to sleep.
" A still older form of the almost instinctive recognition of the fact that sleeping is but in trusting ourselves to the universal love was, " He committed himself to God in sleep.
" Like sleep, a wakeful night may be a growing time.
It affords the quiet, the time, the seclusion to think over the meanings of things, or even to seek the cause of the wakefulness itself.
For that is the first thing to do if we find ourselves wakeful; if the cause be so obscure that we cannot find it, then the best thing to do is to accept the fact.
Either we do not need the sleep we are seeking, the reclining position being all the rest the body needs, or else we do need the wakefulness to teach us something that we can learn or will learn in no other way.
It is a time when, free from the watchful eyes of those who love us, or those who do not love us, we need not fear to look at ourselves, our motives, our relations to our fellows.
It may be only at such a time that we can feel the closeness of the tie that binds all mankind, only in such a time that a life-giving sense of oneness can renew life and joy.
Some persons are so acutely conscious of the surge around them during the day that it is difficult, if not impossible, for them to get any large view of it.
They are so beset and bewildered by each little detail of life that they cannot see any relation among things as a whole, cannot " see the wood for the trees.
" Or, it may be that a lack of poise, a false estimate of the relations of things, makes them find their own affairs so interesting or exhausting that the observing mind gets no large or, deep impressions to be added to the sum of the knowledge the inner self possesses.
For either of these classes the wakeful night may prove more restful and helpful than hours of sleep.
It may be made to bring a breadth of view that will lift one out of the narrow limits in which daily life is passed.
It may do as much as this for any of us, and, if we reject the receptive mood, and insist upon objecting to the wakefulness, we may thereby deprive ourselves of some of the most illuminating experiences.