Hi @mote.of.soul 💛
First I want to thank you for your openness and kind compassion. I’m sorry for your hurt and pain, unfairly inflicted and now unfairly carried. My heart goes out to you in kind. As much as I hate to admit, there is a connection between pain and compassion… even when pain feels intentionally given, which feels different in it’s unfair chosenness. And particularly in the case of abuse, patterns are set into motion… it’s the pain that keeps on giving. And we can feel robbed of certain experiences, like stable wholesome relationships that so many of us are left craving cuz someone broke something critical inside us before we had a chance. I know many of us do achieve these things, probably by accepting who and what we are, and finding there’s someone who actually can love exactly that.

But in the end it’s all somewhat random. There is pain in the human condition, this experiment. We or our spouse gets diagnosed with ALS, we’re born into this abusive family instead of that wholesome one, our lives are upended and our loved ones snatched from us in a war based on someone’s whim, purposeless, or we walk unwittingly into the web of a psychopathic liar. When we step back we are all part of the same thing with varying levels of awareness.

When you say “hits the nail on the head” I feel, maybe incorrectly, you’re gettin at something about the difference between human actions and humanity, and the fact that so many seem unaware, uncaring, grumpy in our own sphere of concerns or dissatisfaction, discourteous in even basic ways. But I believe there is a current that runs underneath all that in nearly every one of us. And that is the humanity. When we open our sense of compassion we become more aware. Gratitude plays a key role somewhere here too. It’s hard for me to include in my compassion those who seem like walking vortexes of pain, wasp nests, competent deliberate human cancer… most of them created by pain themselves, though some not. But I can accept they are part of the human condition and that I can love the whole of humanity anyway, which by nature includes them, and maybe that helps to heal the world.

I think those of us that have pain have more compassion. It’s not because our abusers, or our random bad luck, actually did something good to us. They didn’t. But something about the way we operate, possibly in the wisdom of the universe, allows pain to open something more, especially in the process of healing! And that is good. So we must all seek healing so we can have more of that, more compassion, more gratitude, and we can use that to affect the world in small but powerful ways. And we have to remember that in order to have healing we must do healing things for ourselves as well as others, we have to seek it. A small cut can cause death but it doesn’t because we do something about it. Yet so many of us have gaping wounds inside and do nothing but wait for it to heal itself. Small things, a walk in the park, a long bath, soothing the senses, a kind self thought…

I hope I’m not getting too lost in my thoughts, and it’s one thing to have a philosophy and another to enact it in the day to day. It’s damn hard and life never slows in its complexity and demands. We get lost in our own bull**** all the time and get stressed out and get overwhelmed. I do anyway. But I keep striving and find some little ways to do better, to cultivate a little more, to nurture a little more in the relationships and structure of life around me, and to heal. It sounds good but it’s very imperfect and very hard and I have to forgive myself a whole slew of failings every day. Sorry this got so long, I have a hard time expressing my deeper thoughts in concise or pithy ways. Another flaw, lol. Thx for taking the time to read it.