Tag: pain

A Lifetime

“Lifetime relationships are a bit more difficult to let go of. When a parent, child, or spouse is involved, the wounds are very deep. When the end of a lifetime relationship comes, you may feel that you would be better off dead. The pain seems to grow, the memories linger, a part of your life is dying. You relive every painful moment in an attempt to understand. Your job is not to understand. Your job is to accept. Lifetime relationships  teach you lifetime lessons; those things you must  build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. They are the most difficult lessons to learn, the most painful to accept; yet these are the things you need in order to grow. When you are facing a separation of the end of a lifetime relationship, the key is to find the lesson; love the person anyway; move on and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships. A new life begins when a part of life ends.”- Jasheem Wilson

You Don’t Wanna Know

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“…the instrument behind all this poetry…..yea…U don’t really wanna know bout the degradation it took to straighten my pen into this position…what it took to have the courage to wear my feelings on my sleeves….and to bleed words for a living.”

Betrayal

What happened when you read the title of this post? Did you hearken on a definition, or did your mind replay the events of the past?

They say betrayal is something people do to the ones they love. How profoundly interesting a thought. The TV show The Strain, for instance, shows how the infected return to murder their loved ones first. And in the history of the relationships we’ve had throughout our lives, chances are its the closest love that got us. People who admire our work are those who have a history of hating us for the very work they wish belonged to them. Not all admirers but those who secretly hate when we improve. Like the song says, “Smiling in yo face, all the time wanna take yo place, them back stabbers.” They say some do it with a bitter look. Some a flattering word, and others a sweet kiss. And in the words of Dennis Haysbert (the All State Guy) in a clip from the movie Love and Basketball,  the most bold is right at your front door.

Deception.

It comes in many different shapes, sizes, and motives, and often enters under the banner of love. A smile, a wave, or a joke or two that happens as the knives enter your lower torso. Since hate transforms itself into an angel of light, the love we have for these people makes for an invisible wound; a wound that is not instant thanks to our blindness but that appears later. Dripping from holes unnoticed by the sister you called friend, or the brother you thought loyal. The pain has no calendar to which it wishes to disappear into, and is not interested in evaporating so that you have the privilege of time, in which you decide when to trust again. Not likely. Know that the pain will  sit there long enough for you to put up the proper walls that only true love can tear down. As for trust, it is a mirror that only time can restore. Yes, betrayal, it is a broken bone of trust capitalizing on the scars already on our backs.

So what’s the good news? What’s encouraging about this post? Well, nothing. Nothing except that while Betrayal shows up often, it really only has one job.

To make you stronger.

Struggle

“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

 
What I love most about this quote is that struggle is such a powerful teacher. It passes down the knowledge of self, which without such cannot be obtained. If not for the hardships many of us have been through we would not have understood who we were as individuals. It is a healing experience to transform the mind by having endured struggle, pain, obstacles. No discipline seems pleasant at the time we receive it, but what in creation produces a greater reward than enduring struggle? Show me a better teacher than pain.