Funny how life has a way of rolling down the tracks. We make stops throughout the day; hello, goodbye, and then it's back to business… We keep hammering on…
Every once in a while, something stops us "in our tracks;" perhaps something as mundane as a fallen limb, dead-center on the straight line we furiously follow. There is no detour, so we clear our path… That's what we do. We move along until the wheels grind to a halt. If we're lucky, it was just a glitch. Clear those tracks and we are golden. But then reality faces us head on.
At some point in our lives, we are faced with much more than a simple stay in our schedule. In the midst of our daily dealings, a farmland full of faces furrowing their own fields comes into focus. BAM! The blur we were accustomed to has been replaced by a screenplay we could never have written. No more simple squealing of the brakes. The tracks are straight, but life has taken a turn. We're talking about the halting of a whole train of railroad cars. Every last one. There is no persistence for this pause. No time to rethink this craziness we never even asked for. How dare fate impinge upon our destination! We have become part of a cast of characters trying to figure out what role we need to play now. No script, no director, no costumes. The audience is there, the curtains have parted, the show goes on. Seriously?
We fumble, we flounder, then we fall. Our limbs are limp, we shake to the center of our souls. The darkness in the distant part of the theater is disorienting. The exits are non-existent, and the music has muted. We are akin to a train in Siberia, stalled in subzero conditions, surrounded by an icy abyss of nothingness. We are snow-blind. Frostbite has befallen our fingers. We can neither grasp that which steadies us, nor forestall our fall.
Unfortunately, we are not wired with an ability to assimilate all of life's plans. Our toolboxes are equipped only for fixing what we know and understand. But when the basement buckles, an escape route is useless. We feel useless! But are we really? Does our inability to handle life, due to unforeseen circumstances, mean that we can no longer go on? NO!
I used to think otherwise. As you can read in my soon-to-be-released memoir, Room in the Heart; Surviving a Childhood Undone, Fulfilling a Pact to Love, I almost ended my life, leaving my husband to raise our beautiful, innocent children. I wondered how I could learn to love them when my own parents could not love me. I was horribly abused as a child, reminded by my parents daily, "You were a mistake, about to have been aborted until we realized you might be a boy." I wasn't a boy. I guess that made me a double mistake. Daily I was troubled by this knowledge. This was the sad song that, like white noise, played ad nauseum in my head for the first 45 years of my life.
One day, I received a note from my aunt. Her words abruptly silenced this haunting tune. I could hear nothing now. My life went from bad to much, much worse. Like scissors, her heartless, cruel words severed my heartstrings. These words, simple handwritten alphabetical letters penned on paper, assumed a life of their own… and almost assumed MY life, too. Like a weapon armed with enough ammunition to kill me many times over, they crushed my already fragile, wounded soul. With (at that time) 3 children in tow, I had no manual to guide me in gluing together what was supposed to be a vessel filled with life, but had become a heart slowly emptied by an ever-oozing hole. That hole was both created and celebrated by the very one who gave birth to me. Mother animals eat their young. Some human mothers savor souls… after they've skinned and seasoned them.
We all have dreams. Sometimes they die. Destinations disappear, futures fall from mid-air, and loved ones lose their lives. How are we supposed to go on when all we've ever known or hoped for vanishes into thin air? We gasp for air. NOW WHAT? This is when we reach out.
We are weak, and we cannot see past today, but we are still here. So are others; as long as we're not the last one standing (or crawling,) we can whisper for help because there are others to hear us. What we don't realize in our despair is that those we reach to are not necessarily strangers! We and they might never have met, but our souls can be kindred spirits in our losses. Destiny can bring us together- like you have met me through this blog! Here's why~ like embroidery on dry-rotted fabric, our pain becomes lost when we keep it closed up inside of ourselves. It continues to compromise our essence while its smoldering purpose cools, then decomposes. Conversely, when we reach out to those whose cries we hear, our pain becomes our fighting song! It rises up like a valorous soldier, steadfast in saving souls. Because we have survived, even if barely, we STILL have a purpose. We also have a choice. We can drown in our demise, never having made use of our destiny, or we can use every single ounce of our remaining energy to turn our pain into power! We can be that hand that turns the lights on for those who wander in the dark. We can fuel the fire in their hearts. We can, through our own hurting/healing hearts, breathe life into a soul barely breathing. We can jump-start hearts. YES- we can.
Where do we even start? Anywhere. Just don't waste time waiting for a sign. You see, YOU ARE THE SIGN! Your pain equips you for this task. No need to disguise it. USE IT! When you find others who whisper out, answer! You and I, we ARE that anyone. We don't have all the answers, and sometimes we don't have any answers, but if we are able to hear the whispers of those in need, we are also able to stop and listen to them. Sometimes that is all we have to give, and sometimes that is all they seek. How extraordinary that in pouring into others' empty vessels we inadvertently refill our own!
Why is that? Pretty simple, actually. We live, we hurt, we heal, and we die. But while we are alive, we can simultaneously hurt and heal. That's what we do. We might be torn, shattered, and broken down, but we are soldiers. I'd say pretty darn extraordinary soldiers, at that…