Wounded without warring
In our formative years, we look for those around us to give us direction and reason. The warriors of life who surround us in childhood are usually not trained combatants and they carry the wounds of their own life maps. If they didn’t question the knowledge of the person steering them, they might continue to provide the wrong turn by turn and end up not providing a good route to the next group of explorers. I guess that is how some of us ended up on nearly deserted islands. The GPS kept recalculating.
Battle weary
The walking wounded who had you were doing their best. Probably. It is the best estimation I can think of to describe how the kids in the houses on my block growing up ended up so differently. We all had access to the same streets to ride on, the same schools to attend and even similar daily schedules of meals and chores. But every house had a different vibe based on the head humans running it. And I think they might have all had varying degrees of war wounds. Just saying.
Wounds can Heal
Modern medicine has the ability to heal many complex issues. Humans can also self-heal miraculously. In between, there are levels of boo-boos that healed improperly, left scars or continued to seep for ages. Ugh. Our collective human response is to recoil at these gaping wounds if they seem impossible to repair. We also attempt to stitch up the smaller ones quickly in an effort to stop them from festering. But the autopilot response of trying to stay clear of most of them is the one we need to examine. Sometimes, it is best not to take advice from those who need to do their own healing.
Create your own Prognosis
Once you have realized that your founders did the best they could to get you off to a running start and it wasn’t the best route, stop and recalculate yourself. You don’t have to continue on any dead-end highway or follow the slow back roads to your destination. But you do have to buckle up and drive, all by yourself. If you want to look kindly on those who got you up and running, you can appreciate that they were just wounded and didn’t get to see the medic. Send them good thoughts but don’t hold onto the bad thoughts they handed you; they didn’t mean it. Try to remember, you would not take medical advice from someone else who is ill. They need to heal their own wounds.
Would you feel comfortable accepting care from a wounded person? Would your natural response to help them override your need to get yourself healthy? Are you able to give thanks to those who started you out in life without just accepting now that what they taught you wasn’t right?
