Obstacles To Healing

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The following paragraphs are excerpts from Kyczy Hawk’s book, Life in Bite-Sized Morsels:

Obstacles to healing can come in many shapes and sizes

My heart is tender, yet greedy. She is sensitive, but grips tightly to what she desires. So strange to take captive what my heart admires as free. What am I doing? Why do I grip?

I admire everything that grows, and growth requires change. Pining for people relies on memory, which leaves me in a static position. Yearning for them in this way is just plain mean—and it flies in the face of what I believe. If I believe in change, growth and transformation, then why do I yearn for people and places to remain in a certain way?

I have children. They are grown. They have their own lives, and I love them for it. At this stage I no longer have a “vote” or say in what they do; their health and safety is their own concern. It is not my business how they construct their learning journey, what challenges and obstacles they choose, or how they decide to address them, but oh, how I make it my own suffering! I wish this, and I want that.

My heart yearns for the details of their lives

I want these minutiae so my relationship can stay rich, so my closeness to them doesn’t slip away and I fear them becoming strangers—those who once had everything in common with me. I don’t want to live a life of remembrance and memory, always bringing up the old stories of games played, meals shared, and comical situations that had become the fabric of our past. These things are important, but I want to increase the stories with the tales of now. This means letting go of the attachments to how things were and to allow them to develop into the sweet song of the present.

Clinging onto an image of myself, or my relationship with myself as a static thing, is also not useful. Some days I am on the beam-in the moment, listening well without judgment or expectation, listening to others and to myself. Other days, I resist. I resist the different, avoid change, and wrestle with reality. When I think I have a way of being seen in a negative light, I hold onto this illusion from time to time and it thwarts and controls my actions. I become sway to this illusion by comparing myself to others. Whether I find myself falling short or (rarely) finding myself more accomplished, the comparing always sets me apart. It is fantasy to entertain a desire to be a certain way. It, too, is static and smothering.

The trick is to let things in while letting them go! Enjoy family and friends, enjoy places and events, enjoy meals and music, enjoy my own age and stage in life. Let them be the way they are without comparing them to the way they used to be. Remain open to change, accepting differences, and allowing memory and actuality to morph and alter as they will: let one go to make space for the other.