It's New Years Eve, or Ole Year's Night depending on where you're from. I'm sitting alone in my bedroom and I feel an eerie silence in the air. I'm messaging with some friends and asking how their years went, and I'm thinking about my own 2015. I've already written an emotional post about my own experiences with suffering, and I don't want this post to be about sadness as well, but I do want it to be about things I've experienced this year.
Have you ever seen a person or an animal that had a broken bone that was not reset, or that was reset poorly? Usually, you can tell by the way the bone still protrudes under the skin, or by a slightly peculiar angle on the limb or shoulder. Usually, the person regains some function, but depending on the proximity to a joint and the way it heals, they may experience pain and some restrictions in motion. When a bone breaks, it must be reset. If the patient waits too long to have it reset, it will start to heal and doctors may have to break the bone again to reset it properly. The best scenario is to immediately have the bone reset, so that healing takes place correctly. What I find remarkable is that healing is spontaneous - we don't have to do anything for the process of healing to start, but if we want to maintain as much function and use out of the body part, we have to be conscious of how it's healing and make sure that the connection of bone to bone is as neat and uninterrupted as possible.
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In my reflections on 2015, I keep coming back to this idea: sometimes, living with an injury feels safer than treating the injury. Sometimes, we favour our broken hearts like broken bones, and instead of resetting them (seeing their brokenness, acknowledging the pain and making an intentional connection with the pieces that remain), we widen the space between this broken area and the rest of our hearts. What we don't always factor in is that healing will happen spontaneously. Like with bones, until the broken pieces of our own heart find like pieces to fuse to, they will continue to replicate. In a broken bone, this might mean painful calcification that restricts movement and function and I think that the same can be said for badly healed broken hearts.
From what I've seen, if we ignore a broken heart, it tends to heal in calluses. The goal becomes protecting the injured area, not about true mending and meaning making. I think this is a mistake. Resetting a broken heart, as I see it, involves that initial discomfort of looking straight at what hurt you - fully understanding the injury, and then reconnecting the severed piece to some piece inside of you that is still whole, and connected to you. If calcification is what happens to bones, then heart calcification is the overproduction of protective edges that mute and stunt the growth of actual, functional feelings. If all an injury has left us is hurt, or the blunted, bumpy memory of pain we no longer feel with no connection or understanding of who, what, why or when, then I think we have missed a valuable opportunity.
For me, 2015 was a very emotional year, the kind of year that left me feeling exposed and vulnerable in a way that I never have before. Having said that, it has been my honor to learn so much about people and about myself. I have seen my flaws so blindingly staring me in the face and I have been faced with situations that I never dreamt I would have to deal with, but as I look back on all of it, I intend to make connection, I intend to let those broken pieces reconnect to the pieces of me that are still whole, and I will learn something. Look out in 2016 for my list.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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