Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, November 17, 2010

It's odd that you can get so anesthetized by
your own pain or your own problem that you
don't quite fully share the hell of someone
close to you.

Claudia Alta Taylor; on this date, 1934, she
married Lyndon B. Johnson; she was known
as “Lady Bird”.


I’m not sure what Lady Bird meant; or what in her experience prompted this comment. My personal experience has been that indeed we do get so anesthetized by our own pain that we don’t – and can’t – share the hell of someone close to us ….. or of the World, or of the Human Community. It makes perfect sense to me. Also, I think it’s the height of understatement to say “can’t quite”. When we get consumed by our own pain, we usually can’t relate to another’s at all!

I know that I go on about valuing ourselves, taking care of ourselves, rejecting abuse, loving ourselves. That’s hyperbole to make the point, which is that we are profoundly inhibited in loving, caring, being generous to others when we neglect ourselves.

I think that the whole human community is at a high level of pain these days – often physical, certainly emotional, psychological, “spiritual”. I hope it is to some good purpose, namely that we will be startled into an awareness of the other-inflicted and the self-inflicted pain on all levels and Wake Up. That we will realize how sick we are, and take the steps to stop and reverse it. That we will start valuing each other and caring about each other, start reducing the stress and the hate and begin to honour and respect each other – and put away the religious and ethnic and cultural biases which enslave us ….. is killing us.

Yes, it’s important, critical, to value ourselves. Because this frees us to SEE the pain of those around us. It screams at us out of all the media and the music and the art and the media violence.

Once we begin to see the immense pain we are all in, to see the isolation and the separation and the fear, perhaps we will be aroused, and begin to “share the hell”.

It will make a better and happier World.

Brian+