“When we are tired we are sometimes attacked by ideas we had long ago.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
A couple of years ago, I spent a night on patrol with my friend and honorary nephew Jai, who is a police officer in the twin cities area of Minnesota. I had longed to ride with him on his night patrol to experience the sights and sounds of the dark side.
The night was quiet, and our focus went from the outside to the inside as the conversation turned to our own lives and the darkness within.
Jai had been through a rough patch and it reminded me of a similar time in my own life.
- We both had experienced divorce just at the point when we were beginning our lives
- We both had feelings of shame, heartbreak, disillusionment, and anger
In my experience, when you share a really hard moment with another who has walked in your shoes, there sometimes comes a point of real enlightenment. As we delved deeply into our own painful experiences with the breakup of marriage, we challenged each other to see through to the other side. We simply shared what we had learned, our part in the break-ups, how things had since changed.
Jai shared with me how he had received the gift of compassion from his pain and suffering. He had discovered that since his divorce, he had become more empathetic to other people. He felt that it had made him a better police officer, and he was working to incorporate what he had learned into his police work.
As he completed his patrol around the boundaries of his interior space, I could see that he had indeed brought this marriage and divorce full circle. He had the humility to learn from what he was being taught and is far the better man for having done so.
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our pasts are real.” ~ Cormac McCarthy
Jai helped me to understand my own experience some 40 years earlier.
I thought how necessary it is to occasionally patrol the boundaries of one’s life and revisit the scars of past experiences. These patrols can help to:
- File down the rough edges
- Curtail the first blush of bad habits
- Reckon with troublesome resentments
What often happens at 2:00 a.m. when I awaken tired from a troubled sleep is what Nietzsche refers to as “attacks from old, worn out, half baked ideas from the past” whose only purpose is to convict me again and again. Often, I feel defenseless against these thoughts as I’m thrown into a well-rehearsed pattern of misery. These early hour wake-up calls make me feel naked and vulnerable.
However, when I decide to break from this pattern and conduct a patrol of my interior life, I am reminded that I can take charge, that I can take authority over my thoughts.
This midnight “thought patrol” can deliver me back to a quiet state of mind, and for this I give thanks to Jai and his splendid lesson.
Just a thought…
Pat
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