The Choice

“I tried to banish my memories of the past. I thought it was a matter of survival. Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes pain worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before. In running from my past—from my fear—I didn’t find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence. Fear pulled a current through our comfortable lives. Once when Audrey was ten, she had a friend over, and an ambulance raced past our house, siren wailing. I heard Audrey yelling to her friend, ‘Quick, get under the bed.’ Without meaning to, without any conscious awareness, I had taught her that. What else were we unconsciously teaching our children about safety, values, love?”

“You can’t heal what you can’t feel. Anger, for instance, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time.”

“Sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can choose—or choose not—to perpetuate. Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? OR will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?”