Healing, mine, and my sons, occupies my thoughts most days. What we need. Which modalities works best. Finding new or additional healing ways. Reading another book on trauma recovery or Lyme Disease. Going to therapy. Doing the work–both at home and in the therapy office. Paying the bills.
But I tire of this work being the focus of our family’s life both individually and collectively. As if healing is the only thing that binds us together. I yearn to focus on living. Or what I think living is. Healing seems like the past, living more like the now and future. Yes, we all need to do more healing. I have written elsewhere that the world and its people keep hurting and therefore healing is ongoing. Yet I seem to seek something more, not sure what though. Just know I’ve spent eight years focused on healing first. And I wonder if my focus is sustainable over time.
Yet as I think about it, I am not ready to step away from healing’s many ways. And my unreadiness is not about a lack of courage or living. It is about who I have discovered I am these past eight years. And who I am is someone who in my sensitivity to the world needs places, spaces, and people to work through how life impacts me. I also want to continue peeling away the layers of pain stacked up within me. The ones masquerading as personality and temperament and dictating who am I.
In healing, I find myself in new and fascinating ways. And these incremental discoveries bring me joy! So, what I am really discovering is that healing is life’s nourishment not just its balm. An ongoing focus reminding me of the sentence I composed in magnetic words soon after Tony died. The one staring at us from its place on the refrigerator.
“You can do this life well.”
years later adding a few more words:
“You can do this life well only in ongoing healing.”
Living, for me, is doing this life well through healing.
Image by Tiyo Prasetyo from Pixabay
Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 