It is true that sometimes you discover, that what destroys you is also what defines you.
An excerpt from Arthur Kleinman’s book, “What Really Matters” reads as follows…
Ordinary experience frequently thrusts people into troubling circumstances and confounding conditions that threaten to undo our thin mastery over those deeper things that matter most, such as our self-esteem, intimate relations, or religious values. Divorce, the death of a loved one, injustice and discrimination, dead-end jobs, unemployment, accidents, chronic illness, artistic failure, alienation from faith community: any of these common calamities can break our grip on what we hold dear, and destroy our sense that we are in control of our fate.
As true as it can be, it is also many times entirely contrary. One might require hurt to gain inspiration, but how does one function in the aftermath of a personal disaster? Does he create new definitions of what is right and what is wrong and forget, or does he strive to remember again and again, the things that destroyed him, so as to retain the hurt and hence the definition?
As unnecessarily deep the line of thought may be, these are questions that people ask themselves each day around the world, hundreds and millions of people, and to seek a solution for it all is a good enough reason as any, to think about it.
Kleinman calls them ‘ordinary experiences’, but it might be extraordinary. Just might.
But only if you see beyond what exists,
to be able to say that you are the hurt you have felt and the hurt you have caused, the happiness you have produced is but the passing of time, and as much as hate passes, the most chronic of all emotions, is sorrow, and that is what we know, as humans.
Without it, are we human at all?
Meliora 