Sleep on a snowy night

Looking out my window last night, I noticed how bright the backdrop was for the barren tree, this tree whose presence I'm usually only vaguely aware of as a spot blacker than the black of the 8pm sky, but last night it stretched up with all the fierce loneliness of a true november tree against this white sky and I realized that light must be getting caught between the abundant clouds and the year's first snowfall in Kosovo, and it was at that thought, nestled under 2 down sleeping bags, behind a solid glass pane, in a bed elevated from the ground, in a house with a toilet inside, I admitted for the first time in my life, that it is a joy to sleep.
It was not long ago that I used to declare that were it an option, I'd never sleep again! I was obsessed with time and it's stinginess, and I found ways of tricking my body to save time lost on tiresome sleep. I tried self hypnosis, walking down stairs into a pool that shimmered in my unconscious, or go on walks through woods of my own sleep deprived creation, seeking energy balls of light, which I'd hungrily swallow like some magic drug and continue on with my sleepless day. But once, I got caught in my shimmering water and could not find the stairs back up into consciousness! I felt my physical body hyperventilating and shaking all over, and I started to panic, swimming around frantically and finally decided to kick off from the bottom and jump back into consciousness instead of going the gradual pleasant way up the stairs. The shock was jarring and I decided to give up on self hypnosis. But my demands for time were insatiable and I tried a new method- polyphasic sleeping. I slept only in 20 minute sections, 6 naps dispersed throughout the day, totaling 2 hours in a 24 hour period. This worked for a few months, but being on a rhythm completely alien to all of my fellow humans made me feel a vampire, walking through the night, sleeping in the day, but also just the awareness of being so alone in this contrived state made me give that up too, and I ceased with the alternative sleep methods, but still relished my disdain for this sublunar need. I wanted to be a being entirely reliant upon my mind, my time entirely dedicated to the advancement of my thoughts and ability of my fingers. Sleep was frustrating, and even eating, the time that goes into acquiring, preparing and even merely chewing on food became a nuisance and a bore.
My cycle tour would logically have been a place for me to shed these notions, my stomach was much more demanding and being now and outside cat, my rhythms were now tied with the sun and moon, and it did feel healthy to rise and set with the sun, and of course it felt miraculous after a long day's ride to collapse into my tent and disappear entirely under the moon, but I always knew that this trip was a different sort of existence, and once I got back to the city, where days fly faster than ducks, I would roll up my newfound sleep dependence in my tent and leave it there for the next adventure.
Of course I enjoyed this sleep enriched way of going through the world. Between long nights of dreaming, I would spend days on the saddle first in Germany, loping up the new scents of spring which budded all around me, and seeing bright sunny days filled with bright sunny people and I thought this tour could go on forever. But of course my legs brought me into more dismal places. First it just started with the ugly looming soviet buildings that went on for miles abandoned, which spoke of a complex history I was inevitably going to hear more detailed. But really countries simply started getting poorer as I progressed east. I would see the ruins of a once functioning village, whose fields were now nothing but dust from the flippantly laid road, which cut the village and many fields clear through the middle, and I poked behind these roaring trucks, kicking up anything in their path, and watched the villagers silently looking away from these monsters destroying their food. And then biking through eastern Europe, Romani don't have to hide their shanty towns, they know that hidden or not the local police will pick fights only if they are bored, so I so so many houses of tin and trash. Now they all wash together in my mind into a river of aluminum cans, cardboard roofs and wary faces, peering at me through cracks in the wall of garbage.
And to see all this was certainly distressing, even though I knew that they all existed. Of course, we all know that there is extreme poverty, that it gets so much worse.. but then I started going into the villages with romanesque speaking friends. I went when the leaves on the trees were already past their prime. They had glowed with embarrassed beauty for maybe a week, stunning or boring their observers apathetically, but this too shall pass, their fire withered into a crumbling brown and piles of these once collectable beauties now crunched underfoot as we entered the fortress of plastic bottles and torn shopping bags, dogs fighting over their spilled contents.
We were going to pick up the kids for kindergarten and as we walked in, children rushed at us with huge smiles and open arms. My friends are well loved here and it was beautiful to see such unrestrained joy. I was not so trusted, my broken few serbian phrases didn't get me very far and my hat was too big, I may have looked scary. But one slightly older girl, maybe 9, took pity on meand showered me with hugs and smiles. I was charmed, but only to realize she was trying to pawn off the baby she had been made responsible for so that she could go play. But of course I couldn't take that baby! I had to tear myself away from her sobbing little figure to follow my friends and all the smaller, yet unburdened kids back to school, the squat. Most of these kids were barefoot, none had jackets. Apparently they all had bronchitis and the leaves were all already off the trees. Winter is coming. The squat is collecting clothes but they had just brought all the warm things to the migrants, whose stories put me at such a loss. They are spilling out of the refugee camp which the government has provided but only has room and resources for maybe 10% of them. 300 or more are just in the woods with absolutely nothing. No food, water, warm clothes, roof, floor, tarp, stove, nothing. How they plan to survive through the winter I have no idea. People from the squat are trying to go every week with clothes and water, but it is not enough, and really what the people want the most is that their stories are heard. Many who have been through Hungary and Greece say that Serbia is so much better. They talk of just being thrown in prison for years, where they also starve and freeze, but are also beaten and tortured.. and yet, they keep fighting.
This is really what has been sticking in my head. Throughout this trip, I am continually thrown into closer contact with extreme suffering. With standards of living so low that as a white western person of privilege, I just have to wonder why? What are they fighting for so dearly? To live another day of hunger and cold? To sleep another night next to a husband who beats his wife daily? To be spat on and despised for merely being born? These are things that to me, I feel would be unbearable and simply not worth the effort. I have to wonder if I would just give up, and perhaps that is what the western european governments also think as they spare hundreds that distressing choice, and simply let them sink at sea. But those refugees, or these Roma parents, or whoever across the world, they are fighting for something, something infinitely more precious than anything else- life. Life, survival, it is obviously our whole world, it is all we are really meant to do and it is worth it. And I'm sure for many it is to an nth degree when they have children worth living for, love more powerful than death, this too carries people on to the next day. And I am so inspired by these warriors for life! They make me so ashamed of my afore mentioned disdain for those earthly necessities. I'm so ashamed of how I yearned to be a robot, that I wasn't even willing to do the basic things an animal needs to survive. But oh how glad I am to survive! How glad I am to be inside looking out, to have a full belly and 2 pairs of wool socks on. How glad I am that I have this life I can cherish and protect and that I share this with every being on this planet. How glad I am that I made it to a home just in time for snowfall, that I can curl up under 2 down sleeping bags and enjoy, fully enjoy this basic human need- to sleep.