Making Space For The Hurt

I bet Mother’s Day has always sucked for Shawn and Zig.

Shawn and Zig were two friends I grew up with in the neighborhood. Both lost their Moms when they were quite young. They were old enough to understand what had happened, yet not quite old enough to understand why it happened.

I don’t think they’ve ever understood why, even all these decades later.

Their pain was never something they brought up. They just carried it with them, silently, as they bravely tried to move on with their forever-changed young lives. Time simply doesn’t heal wounds of this magnitude. You just learn to deal with it, in your own way, in your own time.

To look at them both you’d never know of the heaviness that was weighing them down, their pain undetectable to the uninitiated. But that’s kind of how we deal with our pains, isn’t it? Silently. Isolated. Our burden, ours alone to carry.

While pain may be visibly undetectable, life has taught me that the vast majority of us silently carry our own degree of pain and hurt just below the surface. Life certainly is a contact sport and we all have our scars and bruises inherent with simply being alive.

Everybody hurts.

Yet, do we make space for the hurt?

You’d think with the commonality of pain we all share we’d all be a bit more understanding. Since we do know what it feels like, why wouldn’t we want to bring a degree of compassion and patience into the lives of all we encounter?

This is something I am, at times, guilty of forgetting. When the immediacy of my needs become the most important focus of an interaction, it’s not much of an interaction, is it? It’s me not making the space for the humanity of the other.

I’m at my best when I can remember the commonality of pain we all share.

Because that’s when I’m the most compassionate version of me.

Compassion is how we make space for the hurt we might not be able to see but we hopefully remember is always there.

Photo by Anastasia Sklyar on Unsplash