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Healing the Wounds
Today I was moved by Arahant’s most recent post, written in his usual gifted, thoughtful way. The other day I wrote a post about reconciliation, on the Ricochet site and in all our relationships, as the elections loom ahead. As Barkah commented in that post, people may need to vent for a while before reconciling. I agreed. In my hurry to patch up relationships, I forgot one very important factor. Wounds need time to heal, and it can be a very, very slow process.
So how does one heal?
First, a person needs to decide that he or she wants to heal, as opposed to brandishing their wounds for all to see. Some of us like to remind people of our suffering, of our hurt, and we want them somehow to pay for it; we think that someone else has the key to our well-being. Some of us have been injured so deeply that we can’t imagine moving past our wounds.
Second, people who are wounded need to be patient with others who are wounded. Some of the wounds go very deep, having touched into scars that never quite healed, that they seem impossible to mend. We can also become so pre-occupied with our injuries that we become insular to others’ pain and don’t want anyone to notice the damage we’ve suffered. But we know it’s there.
Next, our wounds may have festered for so long that we decided to move on to a place where we think we can’t be hurt, that feels much safer. But life is filled with uncertainty, with “dangerous” places, and we can unexpectedly become caught in a storm of anger and violence. Before we know it, we have suffered another new wound and in some ways it may hurt worse than the others, because we thought we were protected. As much as I love life, I hate to admit that there is no safe place.
Finally, wounds need tender, loving care. We need to recognize them, own them, and work to heal them for our own well-being. We may consider making amends with others, even though we may be rejected, to begin our healing and allow for theirs. We may need to go through a “letting go” process, which is difficult but very powerful.
We may realize that there simply are malevolent people everywhere, who carry that burden with them all their lives. That means we must choose our friends carefully, honor them, appreciate them, and comfort them when they need it.
A path to healing is a transformative process. I hope you will join me in pursuing it.
Published in Culture
Dealing with the sordid actions of profiteers, Grant made the common association of the day of Jews with crooked business practices. Historian Jonathan Sarna wrote a book about it a few years back. From a review by Jeff Jacoby:
Me too. I think we also need to show them how this works, though. Saying isn’t enough.
I think we tried to do that with Welfare to Work, when people were expected to get off the rolls. My friends on the Left said that it didn’t work, because those poor single mothers had to leave their children home. I heard that it worked well. Certainly the numbers dropped–until the states decided to make it so easy to collect welfare and stay on welfare. Just another example of your tax dollars being taken.
Yeah. I don’t know how to do it. I was thinking more of a grass roots, get your hands dirty, community organizing, in the trenches sort of thing, rather than a “policy” initiative or government program (after all, if we’re not in power, we won’t be able to do that anyway).
You know, steal a page out of the Lefty book? Get subversive? Find some Republican billionaires willing to cough up some dough, and start some private seed programs and initiative zones somewhere?