healing
I talk a lot about routine and ritual. About discipline and consistency. About the ways they save and salvage me. If you did a word search through everything I've written you'd have all the proof you need to confirm how much I cling to them obsessively and compulsively.
Routines are my safety net. My guard rails. My coping strategies. A way to maintain a semblance of control amidst uncontrollable things.
Habits and rituals are my armor. My protection. A bullet proof vest between my heart and the world. But if I'm honest with myself and if I'm honest with you, they also serve a more sinister purpose. Something more suffocating and hermetically sealed. An "unventilated darkness", C.S. Lewis calls it, a barrier made of bricks and bullwork built to keep me closed in, closed off, and disconnected. A system set in place to become "unbreakable" and "impenetrable", but also a way to be unreachable too. A method meant to to wrap myself up in "avoidances of entanglement" in a "casket ... of [my] own selfishness". To leave no room or space for feeling anything.
But, sometimes something breaks you open, disrupts all your patterns and protections. Everything withheld comes flooding out and flooding in.
The temptation is to equate mending with mortar. To believe that healing means rebuilding the walls of your anchorage, but "These imaginings of what our healing is supposed to look like are always wrong", Katherine Morgan Schafler says, "You have no idea what form your healing will take". It arrives unbidden. It can't be predicted. It finds you unexpectedly. It is an easy-difficulty. An uncomplicated-complication. We have to admit that we are in this and there's no controlling it.
One of the best ways "to define healing" if you are broken in this or any moment, in this or any way, is in the easy silence that comes when you give yourself the choice to stay open no matter how much it disrupts the safety of your routines.
ICAD - Day 54-57
Great point, Duane on that “easy silence” being a space for thinking. I think of that easy silence as an open container or sandbox of sort. Not sure if that makes sense.
Lovely words Duane. There are many times I feel the need to establish routines in a few aspects of my life and perhaps I damn well should! Love the collages