It is past one, the alarm is set for six, and you are doing everything right. You lie still and slow your breathing. Each time your mind drifts towards the morning's meeting you pull it back, and every few minutes you check how close sleep has come. It has not come. The checking keeps you on watch, and the harder you work at it the more awake you feel, until eventually you give up, switch the light on and pick up the book you abandoned a month ago. The next thing you know it is morning, and the book is on the floor.
Sleep arrived the moment you stopped asking for it, and trying too hard to fall asleep was what had kept it away. It is an odd habit for anything to have, and sleep is far from alone in having it. Ease in company, a holiday that actually rests you, the respect of people whose respect you want, a sense of purpose and happiness itself all share it. Each is reached on the way to something else, and each moves further off when you go after it directly. The pattern is sometimes called the backwards law, and it covers a narrower stretch of life than the name suggests, but the stretch it covers holds a good deal of what matters.
Two Kinds of Goal
Most of what you want does respond to effort. Money saved, a weight lifted, an exam passed, a wall built: each comes closer the harder you push, and pushing is the whole method. The tools of ambition (plans, targets, measurement, discipline) were made for goals like these, and they work so well that it is natural to reach for them everywhere.
The second kind answers differently. Try hard to relax and the evening turns into a chore. Set out to impress a table of people and the conversation stiffens. Check, on the third day of a holiday, whether the rest has started yet, and it retreats a little further. Goals of this kind are where trying harder backfires, and the effort itself becomes part of what stands in the way. Importance has nothing to do with which kind a goal turns out to be, since some of the largest things a life can hold belong to the second. What separates them is whether aiming brings them nearer, and the trouble starts when the tools built for the first kind are turned on the second.
The Watching
The reason lies in where attention has to be. Sleep is a letting go of vigilance, so trying to sleep, which is itself a form of vigilance, keeps it away. Ease in company is absorption in the conversation and the person opposite, and trying to seem at ease draws half of that attention back onto yourself, where the other person can feel it go. The people who hold a dinner table are usually lost in something, a story, an argument, the person beside them, and the effect they have on everyone else is a by-product. Aimed at deliberately, the same qualities turn into performance, and performance is easy to spot.
Pursuit also brings monitoring, since chasing anything means checking how close you have got. For the first kind of goal the checking is harmless and often useful. For the second it is the interruption itself. Am I relaxed yet is a question only an unrelaxed person asks, and each glance at the state is a small step out of it. When the state fails to arrive the glances come more often, which is how a sleepless night builds: the count of hours left, the effort to stop thinking, a long stretch spent supervising something that only happens unsupervised.
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