Power Drains

Sun 11.10.19

      The thing about power is that you should never use it, unless absolutely necessary.  It’s like the battery in your car; if you leave your lights, or your music on when the motor is off energy is dissipated and lost.  Similarly, if a person becomes embroiled in unsolvable situations. Shortly, like the car, they will start sputtering and then lose power.  It must be protected, nurtured, sustained.  Buddhists will tell you that in any fight, any power struggle your opponent is always yourself.  If you look carefully at any issue you are dealing with, the opposition expresses something that you are in some way unwilling to recognize as legitimate, as having a right to be . . . not in your world.  Why not?  Ideas, people, things exist.  Whether there are rules denying them or not, they still exist.  One of the most difficult facts a teenager comes to terms with is that he/she cannot change others.  The best friend is doing bad things and you are powerless to do anything to stop it.  The boyfriend is disloyal, mother drinks too much.

      Imbedded in each of the situations named, is a potential power drain.  One learns to keep mom at a distance, to slowly disentangle from the troubled friend and ditch the boyfriend.  Or not, one spends unhappy years on a fool’s errand, which in time resolves itself leaving you behind.  Mom dies leaving you with a lot of unsolved issues, and a rageful, broken heart; One spends years bailing the friend out of one bad situation after another; and then one day the friend finds Jesus and becomes a person you have nothing in common with.  The boyfriend, or girlfriend is the rite of passage if one sees it and uses it.  It is the ultimate betrayal, a grievous sorrow, and the intolerable shaming.  From that place a new awareness may develop.  One understands that this cannot happen again.  Why choose someone who would betray you?  Think of the Buddhist response: in every battle, one’s enemy is oneself.  This means that you chose someone who betrayed you because on some level you are betraying yourself.  This is what the encounter was about all along.  If you are honest with yourself you will acknowledge the telling signs that you ignored.

      There is a force within you that seeks your destruction, that hates you.  Listen to the messages it sends you, messages that you have to counteract occasionally because they are hurtful and destructive.  Become aware of it, cajole it, steal its power; address it, give it a name, separate yourself from it; it is not you. You will destroy this enemy not with anger or destructiveness, but accepting it as a fact in your life. It will then disappear.

The favorite essay this month has been, Nietzsche