A lot has been on my mind lately, and I have been quite neglectful of this wonderful blog. As a result, I have the opposite of writers block (what would that be called?). This could be a bad or a good thing. My fear is that I will have too much to say, and not bring it together in a focused blog like I should. So please bear with me...
A while back I found myself gazing intently at my own hands. Of particular interest to me where the amount of scars and marks on my hands. My hands, in their own little way, told a story. Two fingers on my right had, the pinky and ring, are more swollen than normal at the joint, a result of dislocating both of them during my time playing football. My pinky is still slightly crooked and out of joint, a testament to my coach hastily setting it back in instead of our team trainer. My hands, in fact, bear evidence of many long years playing football. My fingers on the whole are more swollen than normal, and under each finger on the palm of my hand is a hard callous, thanks to many hours spent in the gym lifting weights. I can see marks where a helmet sheared the skin off of my hand, or pink remnants of turf-burn. And football is only one of the many stories my hands tell. I have a white scar on the middle finger of my left hand where I sliced my finger almost to the bone cutting up an apple. After that, I always made sure to hold the blade towards me when cutting an apple, not away. Lessons are always learned best in pain and blood. Going back to my dislocated fingers, I learned to keep my hands up in front of me when blocking, not to the sides where the fingers could become tangled in jerseys or helmets.
The story told by my hands (and there are many more besides football and apples) made me think of deeper more lasting scars, and the stories they tell. Everyone has heard the cliche of soldiers returning from war, and how changed they are by the things they have seen, and the things they have done. But I think this same concept can be applied to our everyday lives and experiences. The scars on my hands, every one of them, I learned some type of lesson from. In the same way, our life experiences leave their marks on us. We may have been hurt by someone we deeply cared about, and what do we learn? Maybe the hard lesson there is not to trust so easily, that anyone is capable of inflicting pain, no matter how dear they are.
The truth is, everyone has their scars. They have been shaped by them, molded into the people they are from the interactions and marks left on them. Our scars define who we are as people. Perhaps if we kept in mind that the people around us have their own scars, then we would understand how to deal with the difficult people in our lives better.
An image comes to my mind of a living, beating heart. On the surface are white scars, where it has been beaten, abused, and stabbed. It is marked, permanently. Nothing can heal the marks. They may not hurt (or maybe, more likely, they still do), but they are there to stay nonetheless. This heart does not need to be handled roughly or carelessly. Gentleness is necessary, treading softly is key.
This heart, I think, is inside all of us..
