In 2007 and 2008 I fought insomnia tooth-and-nail. I slept only three or four hours a night, and I tried anything to get more sleep. I took a lot of sleeping pills, chewed a lot of weird roots and even tried to hypnotize myself.
Nothing worked. Every morning at 3 a.m. I was wide awake like I had 220 volts running through my arteries. While teaching at Gary Rogowski’s school one summer, I ended up examining every piece of furniture in his home with my hands – with the lights completely out because I didn’t want to wake anyone.
Of course, when you can’t sleep, you are also never really awake.
After two years of this twilight life, I was almost broken. Time passed extremely slow. And each day felt like a week.
Then a doctor friend of mine made an offhand comment that pretty much saved my sanity.
He was talking about his older patients who suffered insomnia. His solution: One ibuprofen. Just one.
“That sends them off to sleep in about 30 minutes,” he said.
His comment made me rethink my approach. Instead of administering even more sleeping pills, roots and mantras, perhaps the answer was fewer pills, roots and mantras. That night I took a single ibuprofen, more as a symbolic gesture than a real solution. But what the hell, right?
I slept like a log that night. And I haven’t suffered from insomnia in any serious way since. My approach is: What is the least and gentlest thing I can do to tip myself over into a good night’s sleep?
This is the same approach I take with making furniture. When I design a chair, cabinet or a table, I ask: What are the smallest things I can do to make this object interesting or intriguing. I have never been interested in shocking other people with my designs. I would much rather design something that makes someone feel warm, comfortable and maybe a little bit sleepy.
I know that my approach is at odds with how most furniture designers attempt to get attention. They use form, color and texture in a new way to make the viewers sit up and notice their work. Of course, an arresting design can easily become like sand inside your bathing suit liner. It starts to abrade the skin and chafe the longer it remains between your private parts and the weird white net clinging to them.
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