There’s no getting around it: I bought this book for its title. I knew something about its author. He wrote two books that I’ve heard good things about but haven’t read, and he is a part of an organization called the & Campaign, a coalition of Christians who are committed to engaging the sociopolitical arena with “compassion (&) conviction.” So I had some indirect reasons to trust the author, but the backstory didn’t matter. I knew what I was looking for—better reasons to get out of bed.
Most days I get out of bed in the morning because I am in pain. I have little tolerance for the transition between waking and rising; I don’t lie in bed awake but for a minute or two. Whether its an arthritic shoulder or neuropathy in my hands and feet, I usually leave my bed to put body in another position to relieve the focus of my mind on my physical symptoms. Being upright but unsteady, I don’t feel tremendous relief, but the promise of a cup of coffee and perhaps some quiet reading offer some inducements, before I have to downshift into the now-rote logistics of morning parenting and the particulars of the day before me.
My day also begins with a judgment—what my doctors refer to as “good control.” I am a type 1 diabetic, and so every morning also begins with a number. If my blood sugar is less than 120, then the message I receive is: “Great job! You’ve managed to stave off long-term complications for another day.” If it’s higher, sometimes much higher than that, the message is defeat, starting the day on my back foot, already compensating for my apparent incompetence in mimicking what others’ pancreases do naturally, in controlling for the intricate interactions between food, exercise, and metabolism. In my case, I also “get to” wrestle with the lawyer-permitted algorithms of my insulin pump.
On those mornings, it feels hard to affirm with the Psalmist that the Lord’s mercies are made new every day. I feel as if I am in a hell of my own making—that is, if my doctors are to be believed. “Just control your blood sugar,” one doctor encouraged me. Just . . .
It wasn’t always so. I remember lying in bed reading for hours in my twenties. Those early hours in bed were a time for a vigorous mental workout. (And I wasn’t even a regular coffee drinker then.) Immersing myself in a thick 19th-century novel or a work of literary criticism or a classic philosophy text would somehow prepare me to go out into the world a bit more sure of myself. Dwelling in the thoughts of others felt akin, naturally adjacent, to the realm of sleep and dreaming, which can be both familiar and alien.
Two books I devoured in those days described diametrically opposed experiences of waking. Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) lurches his narrative forward with stark difference: “As Gregor Sansa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” Is it possible that this transformation is a fantasy rather than a nightmare? In spite of his physical deformity, Samsa has escaped the deadening sameness of everyday life, and he “gets to” confront the existential challenges of going about his day with startlingly fresh perspective. I suspect Kafka’s fictional experiment has much to say about our rote reasons for (not) getting out of bed.
In a different register, Paul Bowles’s Sheltering Sky (1949) opens with the experience more recognizably our own: “He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.”
I suspect that it is this sameness—the realization that our rapidly receding dreams are only a momentary escape from the circumstances of our lives—that undergirds a familiar sadness upon waking.
Some thirty years later, I hoped I would find a set of instructions, or perhaps a rousing sermon, on how to face the day ahead. That’s lot to put on the author of a book that’s only 104 generously typeset pages, but that’s perhaps what makes the book all the more remarkable. Noble offers a set of bundled reflections on “the burden and gift of living”—the subtitle I had willfully overlooked.
Owing to the book’s brevity, I don’t want to say too much. But what makes it unique among books on this topic is that it doesn’t offer simple solutions or promise a resolution of the dilemma but instead offers the gift of mercy that extends from faith in Christ.
In order to arrive at that point, Noble needs to clear the well-trod path of cliches and simple solutions. Here he is very clear-eyed about the limits of—or our expectations from—the mental health establishment. Early in the book he observes: “We desperately want mental illnesses to be as objectively diagnosable, measurable, and treatable as something like diabetes.” I had to bite my tongue on the last adjective in that string, “treatable”—just control it—but he’s not wrong that those with diabetes can measure something concrete and align it with cause and effect.
Contrary to some people’s expectations, he writes, “The best mental health professionals are not scientists who offer precise, empirically objective diagnoses but students of the human heart and soul. They do not provide a taxonomy and rational explanation for your suffering but intuit with wisdom and compassion. They attend to you personally. By grace they may sketch out the contours of your suffering, but sometimes little more than that. They offer a sympathetic ear, wise advice, and ameliorating treatments, but only rarely something like a medical cure.”
Setting expectations both higher (wisdom conveyor) and lower (not an exact science) illuminates why a good therapist may be hard to find.
Medication isn’t a panacea, either. “Psychiatrists can sometimes prescribe a medication that helps lessen your suffering, but disturbingly, we aren’t sure how or why many popular antidepressants work. And some drugs seem to have a higher likelihood of producing awful side effects than doing the one thing they are supposed to do.”
They’re not like insulin, in other words. (And nobody has explored in greater depth the decidedly mixed results of—and the plateaued efforts to develop—psychiatric drugs than sociologist Andrew Scull. See his recent book Desperate Remedies.)
Later, Noble perceptively observes:
With mental illness, there is no neck brace to visually communicate the burden you’re carrying. And there are almost no objective limits. There’s no way for a psychologist to objectively measure your agency or your capacity to work. They can make recommendations, even wise recommendations, but they fundamentally can’t separate your abilities from your illness. That means you have to live in the space of uncertainty between the knowledge that your illness limits your agency and the knowledge that you still have agency-between the responsibility to rely on others and the responsibility to care for others. Any way you try to avoid this tension will end in more harm. If you refuse to have grace for yourself or to accept help from others, you will fall deeper into despair and have less and less strength to care for those around you. If you refuse to accept and act on your responsibility to care for the people around you, you will lose yourself in your own helplessness.
Whoa. These are subtle points that require slow reading to fully appreciate. They show a startling self-awareness and an acute applicability to others’ situations, including my own.
Already here, the key or the response—if not quite an answer—lies in the word grace. Noble perceives the aura of this word as the giftedness of life. The message extends from his previous book, Your Life Is Not Your Own, which unfolds the implications of St. Paul’s countercultural assertion that “You are not your own” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Drawing on Psalm 139:13–14, Romans 8:16–17, and Galatians 2:20, Noble argues that our self-worth is not found in ourselves or our achievements but rather in our belonging to God and our purpose in his kingdom.
As summarized by one perceptive reviewer, “This Christian anthropology magnifies our humanity, because we are drawn to a covenantal relationship with the Creator who designed us and intended us to belong to him. As Christians, we are united to Christ through his atoning death, such that our identity is Christ.”
Pushing these themes further, On Getting Out of Bed is applied and personal. It applies Noble’s earlier insights to those, including himself, who feel their own efforts to live out that promise are hampered by emotional or physical disability.
In the end, the book provided a solace and a comfort that not only exceeded my expectations but also changed them. In a similar vein, T. S. Eliot wrote, “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, / For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.” Shifting our expectations, it turns out, has a profound effect on our ability to act. Unbidden from unrealistic expectations of ourselves, or of our therapists and doctors, we can begin learning to walk in light.
On Getting Out of Bed reads like a letter from a old friend—one that I will likely revisit from time to time, when I need gentle reminders, in the midst of suffering, psychological distress, or illness, of how to face the day ahead.
Beyond the book, I find that my own practice of getting up in the morning requires a few intermediate steps. I need to pull myself down from the abstractions of my dreams and to reattach to my body. I need to, in the simple opening prayer of the Lectio 365 app, “recenter my scattered senses upon the presence of God.”
Beyond the awareness of pain upon waking, I need to be aware of my own breathing and other dimensions of sense experience. Like a someone walking down a rapid heart rate, I force myself to focus on what I am seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting, each one after the other in a slow progression. So it’s the patter of rain against the pane of glass, the coarseness of an old wool blanket, and the smell of my wife asleep next to me that awaken me to reality waiting beyond my own rapid-cycling thoughts.
Some might call this intermediate step “mindfulness.” Whatever it is called, being fully alive to one’s body, even one’s pains, helps to establish the “I” that takes the first steps out of bed and that responds to others.
In the rhythm of my mornings, I have also found that there are definitely things one should not do: Don’t look in the mirror. Don’t step on the scale. Don’t remain in bed perseverating on the remnants of an anxiety dream. Don’t ignore the needs of others. And don’t (immediately) turn on my phone or computer.
With this last admonition, I find surprising intersections between Noble’s book and Andy Crouch’s book The Tech-Wise Family. Crouch recommends upon waking putting distance between ourselves and our ubiquitous screens:
Rather than rolling over to check for whatever flotsam and jetsam arrived in the night, get up and do something—anything—before plugging in. Stretch. Shower. Open the front door for a moment and breathe the morning’s air, humid or frigid as it may be. Make coffee or tea and wait for the brew to finish. There is something for you to discover in these moments just after waking that you will never know if you rush past it an almost-forgotten dream, a secret fear, a spark of something creative. You’ll have the rest of the day tethered to the impatient wider world; let that wait a moment. Give your devices one more minute in their “beds.” Practice the grateful breath of someone who slept and awakened, given the gift of one more day. You slept and allowed God to be enough. Now, for at least a moment, wake and be still, letting him be enough for this day. Then you can say good morning to whatever the day brings.
Crouch’s recommendations pair nicely with Noble’s, in shared wisdom about human nature in the light of Christ.
With this greater awareness of self, in all its sensorial glory, I can rise and interact with others and acknowledge the presence of God.
Note & Query 