At times, and oftentimes before we even know it in the moment, we face some of life’s deepest or most intense trials. As we walk into and through those, we carry everyone with us, their ideas and their memories often, but we carry the lessons most so. As we are social creatures, it feels to me as though nearly every one of those lessons are lessons wrought in community: friends, family, religious congregants, writers, artists, teachers and mentors, neighbors, and strangers that have had more of a profound impact than we may recall at any given time. Some members of your community stand with you more explicitly than others, but when we stand, we stand with all the lives behind us, at a moment, with the rest of our lives in front of us.
As a career learner, an educator, and someone profoundly interested and invested in ideas of ‘self’ and ‘community’ and ‘humanity,’ I find myself to be only somewhat good at actually learning or recalling these lessons from others. That’s something with which I face, but when those deep memories come up to the fore, and I feel prepared because I have seen it before: those are moments that inspire confidence—both in myself and others.
Today especially, I am thinking on those lessons, and the many who have given some, and some who have taught me what feels like nearly everything. The hardest, saddest, and toughest realization, though, is that some people move through space and time for those lessons, whether or not they themselves know why they are there and move on—and some have not yet learned the lesson they are teaching themselves.
I said this earlier this year, just beyond my birthday, and after having struggled with moving through fire for a couple of years. I still move with the flame, and in it, but see that there have been so many around me with buckets of water, large and small, in kind words and deeply felt passions. I said, then, “My heart is so heavy, precisely because it is so full.”
One lesson I did not expect to recall in these moments is that I have already known that ‘self’ and ‘humanity’ are fragile words.
What I did not expect to find, as those surrounded me with water in kindness, good conversation, and selfless compassion, is that the flame does not die out; it changes, and with work that, candidly, is extremely difficult, we can shape it for the better.
For a while I was trying to move past my challenges, my struggle, and my lessons, as well as the people that taught me those lessons, and both helped make me who I am, but more often than that, showed me who I already was.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, a well-lived man is reported to have said “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Fire and challenge as my chisel, and my friends and family the strength I find in my arms, and my loved ones the stillness in my hands in quiet moments where I recall their wisdom with such propound clarity that I become frightened, we get up, and we do the work to become the works that we see within. But by choosing to not look at those issues, and by focusing elsewhere or not feeling or remembering, or being in quiet spaces with my head and my heart at the same time, I was depriving myself of the ability to become stronger from my challenges.
Fire, with both destructive and restorative properties, pain and the needed reprieve for new growth, is among the earliest principal strata that Anaximander pointed to as apeiron, only shortly after Thales discovered metaphysics in the west by claiming “all is water.” But in naming it as apeiron, Anaximander said that it is boundless, infinite, and later Heraclitus would say that it is the arche or the beginning, but also in flux. I decided not to become a metaphysician, but each of these motions or rejections feels true in my body, now.
Fire can heal or destroy, it is limitless and limited, it can be bounded or be unbounded, and it is not coldness. But in the history of medicine, battlefield, trial, or otherwise, fire can be wrought to sear wounds and close flesh. Scars are left, but the body, very much bounded and finite, keeps moving forward.
I miss my friend.
I miss them very deeply.
And I am my scars that I took on for them.
Each one of them wrought in wrath and love and fear and pain and evidence of the deep march of time through space as we, fragile humans, with faulty senses of self and mind, stand up for the things we think are worth standing for—day in and day out—as we rise to do the work.
And some of my scars are in my mind, and some are of my flesh, but each one of them is me, who I have become and am becoming, but frightfully, the longest, most gnarly scars that run along my flesh and mind and are interwoven in the wrath and fury and fire are who I have been before and return to. They are me. And I am them. Like ink on flesh, or badges of office, or sacrosanct jewelry dedicated to specific gods, lockets denoting lost family and loved ones, or tams and caps upon our heads, the way our hair, golden, deep, or raven-streaked tussles in the wind so slightly as we turn to face another day, each one of us is the lessons, learned well or not, learned fast or slow, from the people who brought them to us. And so as well, we are the people who brought us through those trials by fire, with their support.
My heart aches, and at the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I am better for it as I touch the pain and am reminded that I am alive.
Today, and every day, as I think of my friend, their wellbeing, their future and their fate, with calm and retrospective grace, I thank them for reminding me I am alive.