It should come as no surprise to anyone in our world today that we as human beings go through so much in our lifespan. There are enough life experiences for us to treasure and regale in happiness. By equal measure, we have enough experiences that make us feel that we can no longer find the strength to even exist. Highs are easier to handle given the positive vibes around it. However, can we find ways to treasure our deepest scars, instead of destroying ourselves because of them? Easier said than done, but maybe something to consider.
Happiness has its way of coming to us in so many ways and from so many places.
We are configured to feel happy when positive things happen to us. E.g. we pass very tough competitive exams, or we get the job of our dreams, or we chase our professional dreams and achieve them, or we go on vacations to exotic places, or we buy materialistic things that we like (ignore the credit card debt!). And many more....!
Or, happiness can be far more abstract. E.g. we fall in love and experience its extraordinary magic, or we sit with our dearest friends and have the deepest conversations of life and regale in their timeless company, or we go to the exact same joints that we used to from 20 years ago with our dearest friends and family, or we get up in the morning and inhale fresh oxygen, or a dear old friend wakes us up at 6 am, or you pay a surprise visit on his/her birthday and treasure the happiness forever, or we simply cannot put a magical book down while sipping a cup of tea and listening to classical music. There are people who of course, are naturally happy without any of these things - a true privilege!
But scars are very different. And, a tad too intense.
At the very root of any deep scar is the fundamental fact that things or results or expectations from things or people or situations that mattered the most to us, did not pan out. This hits us hard, very hard. It starts with extreme disappointments and can manifest itself into very high emotional lows that we struggle to negotiate. There are some scars that we can do nothing about and that transports us into a state of perennial agony, which takes us even deeper into an abyss of pain.
The deeper the scar, the deeper it sustains and the deeper is its ferocity and velocity that makes us cringe. There could be scars that some of us may carry for life, because those are most likely to be the truest part of our being, and generally impossible to handle. However, strong we may think we may be.
However, deep, real scars teach us our greatest life lessons. It is generally in hindsight that we are able to identify (albeit, analytically and not emotionally), as to why the scars came about in the first place. And when our cognitive abilities take over and enable us to understand the reasons (at least, as we understand it), we then potentially have some chance of appreciating the past experience.
But can we learn to cherish our deepest scars?
Regale in the truth that such a bad situation even happened to us and once upon a time that situation had the possibility of becoming our greatest dream coming true. Credit ourselves that we were once in a situation that many other people may not even get to experience. Enjoy the feeling that the time that we had (prior to the scar) made us delirious, gave us so much of hope, helped us believe in the art of the possible.
Of course, every time we try to cherish our scar, the pain and intensity of our emotion towards it may multiply. But, that is where we need to reinforce our believe that if I was able to put myself in such a situation of realising my greatest dreams, that itself is a strength. And we should find ways to use the learnings from that scar to keep building life forward with a positive view.
Make no mistake about it - the emotion and the deep-rooted intensity of a life scar will simply not go away (as long as it was real and so genuine from the get go). But, scars have strengths that almost nothing else has. We should learn to leverage and treasure our scars with enormous fondness. It might just help us.
