Exhaustion

I heard a news story recently about the new peace and power sharing agreement in Northern Ireland. One statement that got my attention was when they mentioned that some skeptics considered this not a "real" peace but a peace of exhaustion. My immediate feeling was peace of exhaustion is good! I know that one, that will work! 

At least in my experience that's pretty much how it worked for me. I might describe it as a lifetime of continuously adding to this identity. Adding to it and maintaining it. Constantly balancing, tweaking, thinking, DEFENDING, fretting, polishing, admiring, dreaming... Every thought and action seem to be based in someway on creating and maintaining "me". Never stopping 24/7. More more more until it finally kinda built to a manic fever pitch and crashed. Well you might say it crashed and then thrashed around for a few months until it was quite exhausted and couldn't be cobbled back together again. Then I stopped everything and took a look around. Ahhh. It looks like I don't actually have to do ANY of all that.

It's not gone but it's winding down (I'll keep you posted as to what's left if it goes completely). Many of the same thoughts still show themselves now and then. I see them but I don't follow them. Even if I wanted to it's just too exhausting and anyway it's a story I don't believe in anymore. I can't even imagine heading back the way I came. It seems that pain and exhaustion are the motor that keeps me on task and I'm very thankful for it.

So I'm glad to hear that Northern Ireland has been blessed with exhaustion. I hope it works out for them as well as it has been for me.

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I am prompted to add a Post Script:
When I speak of exhaustion here it makes it sound like it's in the past for me but it is ongoing. After that crash my system slowed way down, so much that I got off my 20 year prescription to high blood pressure meds because I was getting light headed from my BP getting too low. I always had plenty of energy to go to the gym or hiking but I would get so slow sometimes that it seemed like I didn't know how to balance it. I think my mind was on a pendulum swing from the manic years. Lately there's been a lot of energy coming back and I can see my mind trying to stear it into the same crazy stories or try to make it *mean* something again but now I know enough not to believe those crazy thoughts and I can just feel the energy flowing and let it go through. It's not that bad, feels kind of good actually, with out all the story and trying to make sense out of it that made it HELL at times before.

This energy exists side by side (in concert almost) with the exhaustion, which is definitely still there and maybe even increasing. I'm not sure how to explain it but it's kind of like at every point when I look around there is exhaustion in that direction and energy in this direction. Do you know what I mean? It's fine if you don't. It's not like I'm all clear on what's going on myself.