sleepless

I gave up on sleep tonight. It's not like I've had an uninterrupted night of sleep for years now. But I don't often have this much difficulty sleeping. I go through the usual culprits: caffeine, hot flashes, nagging worries. I return to the nagging worries.

Why is it that sometimes it's easy to set the nagging worries aside and get on with whatever needs to be done? Other times it seems it's impossible to turn off the mind's fretting! It's not as if I'm very good at facing my imagined worst case scenarios, and yet some days I get so obsessed by those very worries that I become enmeshed in the tangles created my own mental demons!

I hardly think I'm unique, that my worries are darker than those of anyone else! But sometimes I think the wounded parts of ourselves are the parts we notice the most. I am reminded of a dog I had who nervously licked and bit at an itch on the right side of her rump so much that she developed a persistent fungal infection that made her itch even more!

Sometimes I think I'm just as funny as my dog! I get many opportunities in my paying job to observe the many ways people face difficult situations in their lives and you'd think I would have learned a thing or two after all these years!

And it was at work today that I think my obsessive thought-cycle was triggered. I read this quote, you see.

"Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in
the state of being alive....If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even
where confidence is wounded and trust impaired."

Erik Erikson (1902 - 1994)

Of course, I find myself paying the most attention to my wounds and fears! How difficult it is to lighten up, to let go, so the hope can arise. "Hope floats". Isn't that the title of a movie? Hah. The movie of my life...and away I go, drawn into the drama I create out of my life, making up a story, many stories, many possible endings...and fears and worries! I create a to-do list. I fret about things I didn't do, things I didn't make time to do.

Oops. I can't let go. I'm drowning! I forgot that I know how to float. Below my ego's obsessions, I am a peaceful part of an ocean of being.