I'm okay. I will be okay. This will pass. Naturally like a wave that forms and re-forms and washes in and out. This is just a moment in the vastness that is life.
The pain has dulled from the time before. Time has taken away the sharp point of that particular sword, so that a new instance feels just as keen and brings old pain with it, which, despite the distractions (and the vices) the world offers, has to be experienced. If not innermost, it will return...and return. If only very shallowly, roots will grow and bind themselves around and to your organs; some perhaps will even flower and fool you into believing they are beautiful when they are poisonous to you, their host. And poison, if it's drip-fed, kills slowly, as well as allows other hurts to seep through with it.
Choosing to confront some, if not the whole, fresh trouble is better than banishing it or hardening your heart altogether, at least in private, because a public suit of armour may be for the best. Indeed, it may be the only way.
But then some people might say of me I'm only happy when I'm miserable. When sorrows feel heavy upon me, and not just my own. Being a Wednesday's child what do you expect? Perhaps this is my Truth, but it doesn't have to be yours.
These words are put together at a certain place in time. Fastened to one another on a different day, I dare-say their meaning would subtly change, or perhaps I would join them to other words from the English language to construct passages, which at present are not thought of.
I'm a philosopher. An abstainer – from alcohol, meat, fish and orthodox religion. My conventions are my own, for me to follow and not for others to be indoctrinated into. I have no persuasions that I would force unto others. Each has to come and make their own life choices. It is not for me to find offence or question anyone, not even if it's communicated as a means of persecution rather than simply curiosity.
However, this wonder, that governs me as I imagine it does some others, gets wrongly challenged. And misinterpreted. In some cases. Rouses suspicion, and kindles flames that weren't ever there because the thirst was for knowledge and not for devilry.
I should have been a researcher because I like knowing though I may not have set out to know these 'falling facts': the information that drops in your lap seemingly out of nowhere, which you didn't know you sought but something did, and so these pieces, with impeccable timing, located you. But it's okay to be unknowing too, because some things are not meant to be known – by you or anyone – or even once known to be retained.
It's the wonder before the knowing or unknowing that often spells trouble, where interest intrudes on the personal when actually what you want is the bigger picture: the glimpses of life that make up the back stories and alongside the different chapters we each go through. From the stages of life to the opinions that form and swirl around us and either set and become solid, or stay fluid and liable to change.
It's not strictly clinical, it's not as cut-and-dry. It's an interest, a wanting to know a person's experiences and responses, and possibly just through learning of them to make sense of my own. Or to question my own reactions further. Because just when I think I've exhausted an area something new is revealed: a sudden breakthrough in my understanding or a re-discovery. It could even be as simple as the Word, to use a Penelope Fitzgerald term, which alludes to that trick of asking a question and opening a book to a random page where the sentence your eyes land upon is your answer. Or as with me, hearing someone quote Shakespeare, which to paraphrase was: Give sorrow words.
Picture credit: Looking Back, Paula Rego
