Magnetic links… of pain and joy

We all carry hurt and pain inside us. Tiny wounds, big hurts, some closed up, some raw – new ones, old ones – since childhood perhaps. Some heal, some are ignored, some fester within.

There are things on the inside – our inside. Hidden, closed, forgotten. We know they are wounds from the past, we assume they have closed up. We no longer pay attention to them.

There are things on the outside. Things happening to us and around us. In short. Life.

The two seem unrelated, yet seem inextricably connected.

For when there is pain on the outside - physical or emotional, it quickly connects to the pain inside. Pain that we imagine is long gone and buried.

Like a chain of magnetic links that connect swiftly and tightly to other links of pain – going down a well of the past – gripping other loops of pain. The chain becomes long, heavy, lugubrious, achy…

Dragging us down a faceless past - one forgotten or purportedly forgotten, we get embroiled in the links of pain, even if the episodes may be long erased.

The powerful magnets seem to extract every last bit of peskiest annoyance or hurt, buried deep within. The deadweight bears us down… like an albatross…

Shoo…shoo Baudelaire, shoo fleurs du mal. Just peachy huh? Exactly what we needed to uplift ourselves today?

Some years ago, (five to be precise), I decide to make a quilt of my daughter’s embroidery pieces and buy a quilting mat. A self-healing mat. Each time I use it, (And yes, it may be another good ten years that I use it, for that quilt to be done) I am amazed by it.

The blade roller or whatever it is called (tsk tsk… phony quilter), will often slice into the mat as it slices the fabric. In the time that I notice the paper-thin cut, put away the fabric, the slash in the mat closes up, right before my eyes. Quietly. Peacefully. Completely.

I marvel at it. I long to be it. To heal up so easily and simply. To be whole so effortlessly. To feel the pain, yet heal, despite the memory of the pain, without the memory of the pain. I wonder if it is the memory of the pain that drags us down – through the magnetic links of panic and fear. I wonder if it keeps us paralyzed in our future.

But again, just as there are loops of pain from the past, there are the links of joy. Especially with a magnet for metaphor, opposites should attract, right? So, in an ideal world, when there is pain on the outside, these magnetic links should bring out all the good from the past and ease the pain of the present.

I don’t know if that happens. But perhaps we can train our magnets to do so. Just don’t ask me how. And if you find out, do let me too.

For a start, however, when we are in a funk, it may help to know that these magnetic links exist (now that it is all a proven theory (sic.)). And maybe over time, we will recognize the links we make, and will learn to gently break the connections, and allow some of the links to dissolve and crumble into the abyss of the past, holding on to the joyous ones, believing in the joyous ones, refusing to be clutched by the painful ones.

Allowing the past to crumble, allowing us to be free in the present.