Usually a good sleeper, at 64 and after several years of a declining business which is now in a financial death spiral, I’ve developed a depressing habit of waking up at either 1:30 AM or 3:30 AM and beginning the long solitary trek through ‘morning anguish’.
Morning anguish is my term for the early hour’s crashing waves of negativity that befalls those whose internal guidance system chooses the self-defeating rituals of worry to sleep, anguish to rest, and suffering to slumber. Why this occurs at random intervals is a partial mystery. The other part of the mystery is not really such a mystery.
Maslow, bless his tedious scientific soul, wisely asserted that our needs are organized as a hierarchy, with the physiological needs (food, water, shelter, warmth) at the bottom. As a baby boomer product of the 1950’s, physiological needs were always relatively easy to meet. Jobs were plentiful and confidence blew like the wind. Life was challenging but there was always the unspoken assumption that the physiological material goods (like food) would flow to us by divine right and sanctity of our country of origin. If anything really went seriously bad your Dad would fix it, and if not he could still beat up anyone else’s Dad.
Realistically, most of us probably won’t get to Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ level, esteem happens intermittently on a rare good day, love and belonging is never all that sure, and we’ve all broken the safety rules with impunity in the name of fun. But once the physiological needs are seriously threatened, the sleep center of the brain instantly turns to insomno-terrorism.
Conventional wisdom (called such because I can’t think of any plausible source for this information) tells us the hormones once raging through our veins were designed to chase large game over rugged hills, fight to the death for mating rights (well, maybe not for blonds), and generally batter into submission anything in our way. Over time, I’m pretty sure that these hormones have tapered off in me. OK, they’ve plummeted.
Problems that formerly would have been frightened off by my reckless disregard for them have now come back as bloated and immobile monoliths towering through the night. In the depths of the night, formerly trivial irritations now seemingly multiply and organize themselves like swarming schools of fish and begin to hunt about in a predatory manner in the darkness, morphing into sharks. Everything appears bleak, impossible, and depressingly insurmountable at 3AM.
Having someone to talk to at that time would be a good idea, but let’s face it, it’s not available to most. Marriages last immeasurably longer when you sleep separately.
In my case I left a good federal government job thirty years ago to pursue my own business. It went reasonably well for many years, but recently has come undone due to rapid technology changes and my own personal burnout. When things in business go well… they can go very well. And when they come undone, they can come undone frighteningly fast. Nothing prepares you for failure like failure, but until you’ve done failure, each painful step unravelling is a stressful descent into myriad possibilities of bankruptcy and ruin. I lay awake hour after hour, unable to sleep, carefully rehearsing each potential disaster and viewing it in my own sadistic virtual reality viewer, my mind refusing to generate the chemicals needed to generate any hope. At that hour, no one else exists on the planet, and I am alone. Where the hell is the dopamine when you most need it?
Any mistakes I made, or think I may have possibly made earlier in life are put under an electron-microscope for evaluation, cross-evaluation, counter-evaluation, and self-incriminatory inquisition. To me the greatest depth of despair is the absolute isolation… there is no one else to talk to, even my wife, which at least I still have, has any real grasp of the issues and the depth of the challenge ahead. So, one walks through a thousand bad scenarios trying without hope to find some magic bullet, which never appears. Never have I cursed myself so passionately for abandoning a perfectly good government pension. How could I be so damn stupid? How will we buy food?
In earlier days these challenges mightn’t have been a big thing, I had other resources to meet them, but it is now easy for me to see how these long sleepless nights of anguish and lost opportunities can ultimately become life-threatening for many. At its worst my mind can’t see any way out, and turns to thoughts of leaving here. Yes, ashamed to admit that taboo topic, but at the bleakest times I can see why so many older (usually white) men are now turning to suicide. On a recent trip to Alberta a poster in church bathroom announced that 500 Alberta men, many older farmers, had succumbed to the hopelessness and moved on in the past year, feeling they’d become a burden and had nothing to offer. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of missed opportunities for life.
While my struggles are financial and there is still hope, for many others whose struggle may be medical, or homelessness, or a combination of those or many other issues, it must appear yet more hopeless, and just going to sleep permanently seems like the only escape.
Still, in the midst of most bleak of our personal times, our bodies themselves have innate wisdoms that we may often fail to recognize. There may be an inner reason for these nightmares and sleepless nights… our inner selves may be taking this time to shake us awake and force us to focus on issues that we’ve resisted, if we are open to listen for that still, small voice within.
A Course in Miracles would describe that we have only one lack, and that is the separation from God that happened in the original separation. Probably true… but in the depths of despair I find the Course is not much of a help, a stepping-stone closer to shore is necessary. Much more tangible and helpful I find, if one can motivate themselves out of their self-pity at that seemingly desolate time, are some of the more accessible concepts of Eckhart Tolle and/or Krishnamurti, which in many cases are interchangeable. Warning: this takes a small willingness to look at some very simple concepts…so simple and so immediate they are almost invisible to us.
Fear is time. Fear is a memory of a past loss, or the fear of a future one. Fear is thought. And in this basic fact, if we have the courage to grasp it, is the way out of fear…. a way that is so small…. so insignificant, and so simple as to be virtually unimaginable.
Does your mind immediately race ahead to contest this concept? ‘How could we be out of fear’ so simply, you ask? That question is valid, but notice by asking it how we have subtly again moved out of the ‘now’ into the future where we ask this question. The mind questioning ‘the how could this be’ is no longer observing in the present, but it is in a future time analyzing a hypothetical statement. When our minds go to the past, or the future, we are again in the realm of fear.
Not often, but several times, my morning anguish had become so intense that I just felt there was no way out, all was hopeless. But at that time some small and insignificant event, maybe the touch of my cat, or my attention being caught by a color or shape, or the sound of my own breathing, distracted from my projections, and in a small act of courage I fixed my complete attention on the small thing before me, and abandoned the fear. There was a war within. My mind screamed and demanded I focus on my fears, that it was mandatory. But the other side simply whispered, very quietly, to observe what’s in front right now. I was afraid to do so, but I rebelled against my masters and did. And the fear subsided, and a new type of freedom came about. I could feel it, but I couldn’t ‘think’ about it…because if I ‘thought’ about it I’d be out of it, and instantly back into the fear. This scared me, but for as long as I could, I stayed in the moment, out of thought, and out of fear. To be in that place is largely effortless, but when you leave it your mind will be waiting with a vengeance, telling you that you’ll pay for this betrayal of masters and wastage of time and loss of worry. After all, that’s how the mind rules us.
Like me, you will probably resist and struggle against this. If you are in the depths of morning anguish with a million worries on your mind, with crushing problems that seem to have no escape, with the horror of betrayal by a God that seems to not exist, where destruction and misery are imminent, try if you can to find a tiny focus right now, in the moment. Maybe it’s your breathing, or the smallest thing, and focus on it. And maybe your morning anguish will step aside, and let a new vitality within you come forward. I don’t know, I’m still learning, but I think it’s this vitality that maybe can do anything…and resolve any issue.
I hope we can learn together.
