Close Cuts Hurt the most

Drama and disagreement: They are an inevitable part of life.

A painful part, absolutely, but one that often shows up [often] in the most inconvenient ways.

While disagreeing with the cashier at the supermarket or the guy in the BMW, who cuts you off while driving on the freeway, is unpleasant enough, drama and disagreement involving those you love is an agonizing wound that is often precariously difficult to heal (if it can, at all).

Fighting with your loved one cuts deeper than fighting with strangers or acquaintances because of the emotional investment you have in the person.

When you have a conflict with a loved one, you hurt precisely because you love this person.

Love is a binding force.

It connects humans on a soul level.

This is usually a good thing: a mother loves her child; a husband worships his wife; a brother feels protective of his younger sister.

Love is the glue of the universe: It connects every and all things.

Yet, as with all that life entails, there is a flip side to this sumptuous coin: the emotional heartache one internalizes when the bonds of love are broken is excruciating.

Perhaps, this is for a reason: Love is not something to be tampered with.

Emotional bonds between humans are a sacred linkage that aligns individuals beyond the arbitrary confines of time and space.

Love connects people on an unseen level, blind to the limitations imposed by our three-dimensional existence.

Our consciousness is most often handicapped by what appears beneath the surface.

In other words, we focus our spatial attention only on what is physically in front of us: the people we are associated with and the events, situations, and circumstances we find ourselves connected to.

Yet love tangoes through the seen and unseen: we can feel it, sense it, and see it through the actions (or inactions) of others.

It [love] is a dance that feels like a warm, cashmere blanket on a frosty, December evening, when it is functional and flourishing.

Or it can feel like swallowing spoonful of horseradish when it is noxious and pernicious.

On a personal level, I recently experienced a deleterious chronicle of love being ruptured.

This fable involved close family members.

The details are of no consequence.

It is not because they [the circumstances] do not matter.

In fact, they do!

What is relevant is the afflictive fallout that has enveloped a small, insular family in a choking fog of resentment, where a peaceful resolution seems wholeheartedly out of reach.

Trust has been shattered like a femur bone.

It is not something that will grow back organically.

That is the tragedy, laid nude and bare, for a wounded family to bitterly make sense of.

In some respects, the demolition of the bonds of love makes no sense.

Why would individuals, who are connected through the kinship of genetics or the accord afforded by love and romance, consciously choose to disrupt this union, fully aware of the emotional havoc that this decimation will unleash on all participants involved?

It would seem like an act of madness!

Yet, this type of tragic situation happens constantly every single day, to countless individuals in their families.

In fact, one could even surmise that humans are purposely presented with situations that either create or implement “love.”

Alternatively, humans must consistently be confronted with situations that allow the dissolution or rupturing of “love.”

Like the yin attaching to its opposite energy, the yang, life and its continual events may really echo a universal sentiment:

Love is either being produced or destroyed.

A wise individual once said that ALL human actions come down to just two emotions: Love or Fear.

I believe that to be precisely true!

Life is a school.

You are to learn.

You are here to grow.

You are here to experience joy.

You are here to suffer from pain.

Good cannot exist without bad.

Love cannot exist without hate.

The lesson in all of this is not to deny the anguish that conflict with the ones we love may inflict upon us.

In fact, one should embrace it!

The wonderful things that life can offer could not even exist without the presence of the terrible things.

It is this type of duality that is a necessary component to being granted the “gift” of experiencing life.

Life is a spectrum comprising endless events, people, and situations, meant to evoke a range of feelings and emotions.

It is set up that way.

One does not have to enjoy being hurt by the ones that matter the most.

However, one can accept, understand, and ultimately move past the pain inflicted by the ones we cherish.

Pain will always exist.

It must; there is no other way!

However, it is one’s personal choice how to (or if) to respond.

You are human: you have free will.

While suffering does carry a certain amount of emotional comfort, it can quickly become disastrous if not kept in check by a relative degree of suppression.

My closest relatives broke my heart very, very recently.

It hurts; I will not deny the psychological heartache I have been internalizing.

I think that while allowing a period of “grieving” is an acceptable (and perhaps, necessary) act of personal betterment, it need not become a prison, where an individual is locked in a six-by-six cell of pain, anger, and heartbreak.

Instead, one can ask oneself:

What is the [situation] teaching me?

What can I learn from this?

How can I grow and be better because of this?

When a person uses suffering to re-align with empowerment, that is when they have “learned the lesson” that the grief was attempting to show them.

If a person can turn sorrow into a blessing, they have truly transcended the shackles of human calamity.

They have grown as a person.

Ultimately, pain is a catalyst for growth.

Without it, we would rot away from stagnation, swallowed whole by an existence consumed with dullness.

Life would be a waste of time.

That is why we must grasp onto hardship and torment with an unshakeable resolve to accept it (not like it), but to accept it!

At that precise moment, when the trust of treasured loved ones is irreparably fractured, one must welcome this pain with open arms and with no caveats.

Look, it is not easy to do this.

It really can’t be.

If one can embrace this attitude, then they possess that which very few others truly, truly ever have:

Power.