weaving

I've been reading a few random blogs today while losing the battle with 'The laziness', as amyD terms it. Reading other people's personal stories is interesting. Many a biography has obviously sold on the principle. I wonder, though, when does the time comes for letting go? I am as prone as anyone else to blame others for any misfortune afflicting and influencing my life. I am also able to, I hope, award these blame-ees the complexity and confusion of thought, emotion and feeling that I too experience. Parents and teachers and peers and those in positions of authority within our personal lives, are not infallible gods, not fallible gods, in fact not gods at all, or if they are, they definitely have clay feet. True, especially when we are children, other children, but also adults, can have waspish tongues, perverted imaginations and no sense of empathy or sympathy whatsoever. As children, we lack the strength, maturity and perception to defend ourselves, and there is a tendency to internalise the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, rather than to take arms against a sea of troubles, or to put up a very visible shield at the least.

If our life has been made up of events that are far from the best, due to another's lack of judgement, forgetfulness, and sometimes sheer vindictiveness, then there is no need to forgive. Likewise, though, there is maybe no need to carry, one minute past the next, the hurt and pain caused by the actions. Recognising hurt is necessary for it to diminish, holding onto the hurt means that it probably will never do so. When we are children, things that strike multiple times, like a rattlesnake, secrete a poison into our bloodstreams. This might gain, rather than weaken, in toxicity when we are adolescents, depending upon our life experience, circumstances and way of looking at the world. By the time we are adults, the anti-venom may be difficult to locate. After all, the things we feel as children, the stories we tell ourselves and others tell us are hard not to view as truth, especially if we have been telling/listening to the same story all our lives.

But, as I go through my 40s without a roadmap, I know my parents didn't have one either. As I deal with emotions that swing erratically from one side of the pendulum to the other (and all the degrees inbetween), how do I know that they did not experience similar kinds of feelings and confusion when they were my age, and younger? My emotions often do not make me the most pleasant person to be around, and I hope not to inflict any shame or nastiness on loved ones, those I teach, or even random strangers, but I am not always successful. I hope that others see that I am more consistently good that consistently erratic, though this could be my own misconception. There are adults and children who should know better, but who will, perhaps, throughout their lives never know better. Who knows what makes them that way?

But for us to carry their toxin still, though it can be hard to locate and suck out, is not a healthy or happy way to live. True, the venom probably never so much leaves as it diffuses into a homeopathic remedy, applied after the event. Of course, for this to happen stages of acknowledgement and recognition have to be experienced. Nobody ever really leaves those stories behind, but they can be woven into a larger story, rather than being the story - a black thread that provides contrast and reminder, or a pastel thread, barely noticed against the others, an anomalous silver gradating between light and dark.