Thoughts On: Moving with the Pain
“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” From Haruki Murakami, IQ84.
While I’ve stopped reading Haruki Murakami for personal reasons (one of them being that he doesn’t describe women in a way that resonates with women), this particular saying still struck me as a universal truth.
We have many words to refer to an unpleasant feeling. Pain. Stress. Trauma. And for the longest time that our memory can remember, our body keeps the score of our wounds. On one of those days when we are so tired, our barriers to holding the wound are thinning, and it floods all over the place. On a sunny day, we might wish to curl up by the sidewalk, seized by paralyzing seconds.
And I’m not asking you to just get over it.
I have learned. The key to unpleasant feelings was not positive thinking. Positive thinking will ask you to cheer up. Hey, it’s okay, it’s not that bad, and I promise it can be a lot better. You know, life is a cycle of ups and downs! Cheer up!
Positive thinking, not accompanied by compassion, might fail to let us see emotion for what it truly is—feeling it without judgment. It might as well force us to suppress and ignore it until it hits us on an ordinary day.
The failure to experience unpleasant and intense emotions leads to isolation. The constant feeling of being misunderstood. We become closed off, slowly losing sympathy towards others’ wounds, or become hyper-aware of every pain in the world. Either we repel or we absorb any kind of wound.
But didn’t our wound mean something when it was seen? Was it better to speak or to die?
The answer was neither.
Well, let’s take a short walk. I’ll heat the car’s engine, and we’ll go buy some ice cream. You can count how many cars were black and white. I’ll play the songs that we don’t have tickets to watch at the concert. Sing slow, sing loud, and sing mellow. Just sing. We can use words more than twice in a paragraph. It’s okay.
I learned all along that the antidote was warmth.
And that is a universal truth, as much as the first quote. I’m not a savior. But I am a human. It will not heal every wound in a jizz. But I will not let you sit and stare at your wounds.
I am here to remind you that there are ways to look at the sun through the clouds. There are some things that we stopped liking after a wound, yet there are more, more things to look forward to liking.
These wounds make isolation feel like a good option sometimes.
Isolation is a fake luxury made of golden cages. Those who feel safe behind it have missed the chance to be seen completely and be tolerated. We might miss the chance for genuine emotional growth.
The rawness. The human in you. Don’t kill it.
Instead, let’s embrace warmth. Let’s comfort our wounded hearts by acknowledging that pain is a shared human experience, one that countless others have faced and overcome.
Someone had given up telling good teachings and been swallowed by the whale. Someone had thought there was no way out of the well, caught in a sibling rivalry of jealousy.
Just as others before us found their way out of pain, so too will we.
