TW: murder
Some end of year reflections on what healing means to me and the vision I hold for the future.
Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com
Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
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Beat Provided By https://freebeats.io
Produced By White Hot
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TW: murder
Some end of year reflections on what healing means to me and the vision I hold for the future.
Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com
Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
---
Beat Provided By https://freebeats.io
Produced By White Hot
---
Hey my friends as I do my holiday shopping this year, I find I'm really struck with sort of a mindfuck. Like here I am buying food and gifts while there are people in Gaza that are being murdered and bombed out of their homes. Like the disconnect there is kind of wild. Like I'm just going to celebrate a holiday while there is a literal genocide happening in the world. And this isn't anything new. There is basically a constant slew of tragedies that are happening all the time whether it is the Gazan genocide, or the Hawaii fires, or the war in Ukraine, or the child slavery in the Congo. I understand it isn't anything new. I think people have a tendency to only really care about things that are affecting them and hurting them. And part of that is probably a mental protection. The world is so huge now with our 24 hour access to news. And our nervous systems are not built to handle that large of a scale. If you took away our digital access, we would only know about the things in our immediate communities that were happening. But I also think that that same apathy is still happening in our immediate communities. Most of our immediate communities still hold some kind of suffering in them whether it's domestic violence, homelessness, etc. I think that apathy, that tendency to only care about things that are personally affecting you or hurting you, is one of the reasons why we have so many people who feel broken inside. People who feel so alone and disconnected. I think it contributes to our mental health crisis. I think many of us probably experienced some of that apathy. Right? How many signs were there that things weren't right in your home that people had to ignore? How much did you struggle while people around you cheered you on verbally, but didn't actually do anything to help you either? How many people that you thought would be there for you weren't simply because they found it too uncomfortable to sit with someone in their suffering? How many fake 'let me know if you need any thing's have you encountered? Lots of people say that, but how many have actually meant it? And it comes down to a certain apathy: not affecting me, not my problem. But I think it is though. I think it is an oversimplification to think that the suffering of others doesn't affect you. I think the suffering of the collective hurts individuals. Because hurt people hurt people. And the more hurting people are out there, the more people are getting hurt. I think it can become a vicious cycle that we're all just kind of trapped in. I think it is a lie when we tell ourselves that other people's suffering isn't our problem. But as long as we think it is, there will just continue to be more and more suffering in the world, both in small and large scales. We can feel it in the small scale, right? Someone doesn't return a shopping cart because it's not their problem anymore. It's someone else's. Small. But then the store clerk has to go around the parking lot and gather all the stray carts which makes the cart gathering process both harder and take longer than it should. Now that store clerk is extra taxed and so he's short with someone else. That ruin someone else's day and so on it goes. Every little bit of small suffering rippling out all the way to the large scale suffering. Because you don't go bombing civilian populations if you think that the suffering of those people is your own suffering. You only do that when you think their suffering isn't your problem. We're all in the petri dish of this planet bumping into each other. And when we think we aren't bumping into others, when we think we aren't affecting others and they aren't affecting us, we are fooling ourselves. When my ex was growing up, he went to a boarding school. He was tortured by other kids in his boarding school in very similar ways to how he tortured me. When he was young, his mother used to send him to spy on his dad and see if he was doing anything bad. She told him all of the "terrible" things his father did and the affairs that he had. She involved him in the invasion of his father's privacy and sneaking around and spying on him. And then later on in our marriage, I would have no privacy and a similar paranoia would take place. Ripples. Those boarding school kids never knew that they would also be hurting a woman they had never met. Whoever hurt them to make them do that in the first place didn't know any of the other people that they'd be hurting. We've all been touched by the ripples of suffering. We've all perpetuated the ripples of suffering. And this is a hard thing to wrestle with because it's kind of the culture we live in. And an individual can't change a culture. We cannot take away an entire cultures proclivity to only care about stuff that is immediately affecting them. We can't make an entire culture see the way we are all interconnected and intertwined like a web, with the suffering moving backwards and forwards and rippling out in unexpected ways. It's too big and it's too overwhelming to even contemplate that. All we can do is create pockets, pockets of true caring, pockets of true support. Because how much suffering would it have alleviated to have somewhere to go when things got rough? You think about all the tough times in your life, all the rough times, how much suffering would it have alleviated to have had support? How would it change your life if you knew that if shit ever got hard there were some humans that had your back no matter what? We can begin to find people with whom we can create the micro culture of taking care of each other. We can create a micro called being with the person with the cancer diagnosis even if it is uncomfortable for us and brings up our own fears. Of bringing dinner to the friend who is going through something even though doing so isn't convenient. Of knowing that if you're not well, I'm not well and that the only way we survive is together. That is what I envision when I think of healing: pockets of microcosms of people who truly care for one another. And the healing that that brings. That is the world I want to live in. That is the vision that I carry within me. That's all I have for you this week, my friends, a vision. A vision to noodle on and an invitation to create your own personal pockets of support and healing. It's what I'm going to be doing, no matter how many years it takes me. And this is your invitation to do the same. Until next time, be well and happy holidays.