I think every child birth facility should have a big sign telling “Biohazard”. Because there’s a huge risk of dying if you come to life. There’s a huge risk of failing if you try. There’s a huge risk of being hurt if you truly love.
The only way to be safe is to not exist at all. But from the very moment you’re alive, you’re prone to accidents. To hurtful episodes. To bad stuff happening to you.
Believe it or not, it’s the mere fact that you’re alive that bought everything into your awareness: pleasure and pain, hope and despair, good times and bad times. They’re all part of life. Expecting to live in a pinky universe, where nothing bad happens, when conflict is shielded and frictions are avoided, in my opinion, equals death.
Because life happens on the tender areas, not on the shielded ones. Life grows in the open and the open may let some storms in too, every once in a while. Shielding, protecting, closing spaces will provide you survival. But survival it’s not living. You may breathe again the next day, as a survivor, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll also smile. You may have a functioning body, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll still have a soul.
It’s the same with wounds: in order to heal them, you have to expose them. If you cover your wounds, they’ll eventually get infected. You may look fine form the outside, but, deep down, your covered wounds are eating you alive.
You need courage to open, of course. You need faith. You need endurance to be able to cope with the unavoidable hurt we all get from time to time, not because we’re guilty (as religion made us think), not because we did something wrong, but because life it’s a fundamentally unfair game. Shit happens. You can’t avoid it, it’s right there in front of you.
But, as a living creature, you’ve been gifted with a tremendous tool: choice.
You have the choice to process the shit, learn from it, grow (even flowers grow by processing shit) and then feel alive again. Or you can choose to let the shit persist in your system, accept it like something you can’t do anything about, succumb to disappointment and surrender to failure, and then look how your life is slowly becoming rotten, how your relationships are getting putrid, how your feelings are shrinking.
The so called bad stuff is more often than not a blessing in disguise. It’s an opportunity to transform, to evolve, to be more. Oh, boy, it hurts when that happens. But between growing after being hurt and remaining stuck in a dead pattern, I always choose the pain.
It’s more rewarding. At the end of suffering, there’s always a reward. Always.
Thankyou Dragos,
A good reminder to be courageous. It is definately tempting to try to avoid everything bad and I was kind of brought up like that. But the important thing is that along the way I decided to take control of it, go on my own path and take risks I wouldn’t have before. The journey has definately been worth it!
-Ben
It’s all about being vulnerable, in my opinion. When you’re vulnerable, you’re open to hurt, but, pain apart, that’s a great opportunity to heal a blind spot, and, next time you open, you won’t be as fragile as you are now. But if you keep hiding (your wounds, your feelings, your vulnerabilities) you won’t be able to heal anything.