There are a thousand ways to hurt, and a thousand ways to heal.
It hurts to twist your ankle. You can heal it by resting, by going to a physiotherapist or an osteopath, by talking about your ankle and what it is like to be in pain. You can accelerate the healing by making jokes about your ankle and your hurt—that is, jokes about yourself. Recent studies have shown that laughing feels good. (These studies, however, are scientifically suspect as they were performed without a control group.)
It hurts to get a paper cut on your finger. It’s the typical “annoying” hurt. It distracts you from writing and typing and drawing and cooking and playing the piano. Even though it’s a tiny cut, practically invisible, it hurts nevertheless. Also, besides how annoying the cut is, you have to deal with how annoyed you are with yourself for having being inattentive and cutting yourself for no good reason. There’s a word in Yiddish for what you are when you cut your finger for no good reason: a nogoodreasonnik. And there’s another word in Yiddish for people who believe everything they’re told: a shmoo-moo-moo, colloquially referred to as a Moo-nik.
It hurts to lose a lover. It’s not the same type and level of pain as a paper cut. It takes longer to heal, and the process is more elaborate. While lover-less, you can go to Healing School and learn about Hurting and Healing from friends, from family members, from movies and books and podcasts, and from the sunset. Strangely, the Yiddish word for sunset isn’t sunsetnik. Instead, it’s זונ - ונטערגאַנג (pronounced “zun - untergang”).
It hurts to be told that you have nothing to say, or that you have no voice, or that you really should think twice before opening your mouth again. It heals to speak, shout, sing, howl, and meow. Did you know that in Yiddish a cat is called a meownik?
It hurts to be in an upside-down world of contagion and confinement. It hurts not to work and not to earn a living. It hurts not to travel, not to go outside, not to visit the street markets, not to rehearse and improvise with cherished colleagues. It hurts to find out that a friend is terribly ill, and to feel that you can’t do anything to help. It hurts not to know how things will turn out. Uncertainty quickly becomes a sort of certainty: Things will never be okay again. This certainty is very, very painful. Although it isn’t easy to achieve, it might heal (a little) to walk from the absoluteness of certainty and back to uncertainty, to its inherent flexibility, its untold possibilities:
In truth, I don’t know how things will turn out.
Everything has a negative and a positive charge. The positive charge of demagoguery, for instance, is our heightened conscience of the value of citizenship, of its rights and duties, and also its joys. The positive charge of confinement is reflection and meditation, among many other valuable actions. The positive charge of a worldwide catastrophe is solidarity, generosity, mutual support, the acknowledgement that we are in this together, we have always been together, and we’ll always be together. I mean, all of us: the parent and the child, the demagogue and the citizen, the nogoodreasonnik and the meownik, the sunrise and the sunset.
Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget: there are a thousand ways to heal.
©2020, Pedro de Alcantara