A little darkness

I’m borrowing this one from yesterday, really. But I’ll no doubt be able to experience it again in another half an hour anyway. It’s that final pottering and turning off of lights, closing down the home for another day. And what makes it easier? Low light.

If you’re at the tail end of the day, why do the final before bed stuff in maximum light? When you’re at home, somewhere you can pretty much work your way round by touch anyway, coming a little closer to this by gradually turning off the lights is a lovely way to wind down.

The room feels different this way. You don’t need to see everything to do the things you do every day – whether that’s setting someone’s place for breakfast, rescuing a few toys, or simply putting all the ‘damage’ in one pile for the next day.

I tend to take this a bit further. If I walk into a room, and can see enough from the hall light, I tend not to put any extra lights on. (This skill can be honed further by putting away clothes in someone’s room when they’re sleeping.) It’s not that I wander from room to room in darkness – it’s just that reducing light levels can be very soothing.

Many moons ago, I was a volunteer at a school for the blind. It only took to day 2 for me to realise ways in which the kids there were ahead of me. Sledging by moonlight was one of them – it was no different for them than doing so by day. In fact, they had the advantage, because their watches could help them tell the time in the dark, whereas mine couldn’t.

Power cut? No problem. They wandered through, not because of the dark, but because of other people’s racket at being suddenly stuck in the dark. Their confidence, when others were unsure what to do, was strangely compelling.

Sometimes I would ‘try out’ their situations: seeing if I could wash my hair without once opening my eyes. (Try it. Finding the shampoo, working out how much you have in your hand…harder than you think.) Could I walk straight along a path in the dark? It was a way of empathising, I guess, as well as familiarising myself with their world.

These days, I can still bump into things in my own home, if it’s totally dark. But a little darkness – that’s manageable. When you’re tired, and your eyes are closing, you can relax in lower light. And at this time of year, operating in lower light conditions, it’s a relief to lower the lights at an ‘appropriate’ time.

You don’t need to go around and say goodnight to every Jim Bob that happens to be around. But if bedtime routines work for wee ones, they have their benefits for grownups too. Just put the light out on your way out, would you?

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