It was just another day, when a friend told me, "Hey you haven't updated your blog for a long time." I sneered thinking, in this gigantic community of internet based readers and writers, how does it matter what I write?
But I told him, "I don't have the time."
He asked, "Why don't you make the time?"
For a couple of days I have been thinking, what could I write about. And a single word comes to my mind. Pain. Not the seething, unbearable physical pain. But the quiet, docile, heartbreaking pain, which stifles you from the inside. Why should such a pain exist? What are it's symptoms and what is a possible cure?
Last Sunday, a colleague of mine lost her dearest companion, her beautiful dog, Jacqueline. The news of it shattered me, because I love dogs and I couldn't imagine what I could have done, if I was in her place. Possibly shut myself down, without speaking to anyone for a month or as long as it took.
Around the same time, I was reprimanded at work, in the most ostensible fashion. I lost my weekly off and I scraped through the week somehow, with frequent visits to the washroom where the humiliation of a breakdown would thankfully escape the public eye.
The week was difficult for both of us in different ways. While I made a joke about it, bracing myself every now and then, my colleague recovered a little, each day. She didn't skip a single day at work. And her smile slowly grew bigger and brighter.
We were fighting different battles, both of us, but we were also battling the pain inside us. And we tried to tuck it in, to hide it, discreetly but indefintely. And at least for me, it didn't help. What I realised is that we get over a sense of affliction, only by embracing it first. Because our lives will forever remain punctuated by moments of discomfort and agony. But there will be times, which will dissolute the unpleasant moments and we'll somehow learn to move on.
And letting go is far more difficult than simply leading an unhappy life. It's harder because it needs great resilience, courage, and a silent hope and prayer that like a gush of wind, the pain will also ease away.
Ultimately it does. What lives on, is a childlike excitement, which is vulnerable but equally innocent. It allows us to love, and be loved, try new things, make mistakes, admit those mistakes and to move forth in life.
The pain is not less painful now, but somehow we are okay to let it consume us temporarily, before finally setting us free.
