Father, I have much to be grateful for tonight and I thank you. I have much to regret and I ask your forgiveness. But even as I ask your forgiveness, I know that I receive it, and a deep peace fills my heart. Help me to sleep well tonight and to wake early ready for that daily yet greatest of gifts, a fresh start.
Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there's no escape, there's no excuse, so just suck up and be nice.
Tonight go to sleep as though your whole past has been dropped. Die to the past. And in the morning wake up as a new man in a new morning. Don't let the same one who went to bed get up. Let him go to sleep for good. Let the one who is ever-new and ever-fresh awake instead.
I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
It used to be that if you got on 'The Tonight Show,' your career was made. Now, if you're on 'The Tonight Show,' maybe 14 more people show up to your gig in Tulsa.
Maybe tonight, maybe tonight by the fire all alone you and I. Nothing around but the sound of heart and your sighs.
You're 30: You know stuff now. Your 20s were for 'ducking up,' as my auto-correct would say, and learning from those mistakes. (For instance, never again will I convince myself that sleep is for sissies and go straight from a party to the airport. You will not 'sleep on the plane'; you'll vomit in the security line. Go to bed.)
Halt snorted derisively. "Battleschool evidently isn't what it used to be," he replied. "It's a fine thing when an old man like me can sleep comfortably in the open while a young boy gets all stiff and rheumatic over it." Horace shrugged. "Be that as it may," he replied, "I'll still be glad to sleep in a bed tonight." Actually, Halt felt the same way. But he wasn't going to let Horace no that.
My deal is that I pay more attention to whatever job I have than the relationships I have. Now, if I had considered my job to be a wife and mother, then I would have been pretty good at it. But I didn't consider it a job. I thought it was like brushing your teeth - it's not fun, it's just something you do to keep your teeth from falling out.
I have to shave every day. If I don't, it's sort of like going to bed without brushing your teeth for me - but I'm a crazy person so maybe that's why.
I do know it, my own. Let me tell ye in your sleep how much I love you. For there's no so much I can be saying to ye while ye wake, but the same poor words, again and again. While ye sleep in my arms, I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams will know the truth of them. Go back to sleep, mo duinne.
I awoke you from your sleep because I saw that you were having a nightmare. And now you are cross and say to me: "What are we supposed to do now? Everything is still night!" You ingrates! You should go to sleep again and dream better.
Too many people - some of them judges - seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to bed tonight.
Some people, you have to grit your teeth in order to stay in the same room as them, but you get on and ask the questions you assume most of the people watching want to ask.
Sleep is a death, O make me try
By sleeping, what it is to die,
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
I always try to be nice to the paparazzi because finally, maybe one day, they won't ask for me, and I will regret it.