The first strike of heat from the stove may well be painful, as reason and experience are quick to teach us. But. The too often overlooked postscript to this disagreeable education is that the strike, in and of itself, is none more risk-laden than the burning (pardon my use of this word, placed aptly in this moment of soliloquy) desire to keep our hands clasped, allowing fresh wounds to fester and ache.
Unclenching our fists, relaxing our palms, bringing them again to the light to be examined, seems to stand against reason. But it is only as we open our hands again to the sky that we allow healing to take it’s firsts steps across the threshold of our distress.
Forgive me, however, for momentarily disregarding the nature of we, as human-people, to contract and close, tightly, as to not let anything beyond the steadfast and reliable shield of our own bodies as we draw upon ourselves alone for protection. In the same heartbeat of the flame and fire that allowed the first of us to become the next of us, that instinct runs as deep as any other.
And it saved us and it saves us.
At times, the rag tag army of our human-ness is held together only by the solace and safety of the fortresses within us. (Spare me your quotes of great men of gallantry and pride and your “never surrender!” pontification, if you would.) Surrendering to our brokenness will, in the grand balance sheet of it all (could you really tell me what “it all” is, after all?), never leave us wanting.
Behind the walls and buttresses of safety we rebuild and mend and repair and we, we with heart-pain, are tacked back together. Stitched and tacked and basted back together until we again possess the mettle to raise our rusted over portcullises.
There’s your lesson.
Or mine, rather.
In the balance.