Episode Summary

This episode is about experiences we all share on our life journey; and one of those is hearing old sayings that are uncritically accepted as true. Unfortunately many of these bromides are false, and getting to the real truth is essential to moving forward in a wise and balanced manner.

Episode Notes

Ben Franklin wrote down many of these sayings in his Poor Richard’s Almanac and your grandparents helped him out. In this episode we consider three of these sayings and try to understand just how they are true and how they are not. 

The first is the notion that, “Time heals all wounds.” This is not true. The real truth is that only love can heal our wounds. Imagine for a moment that you were bitten in the touchas by a poisonous snake. Would you believe then that time heals all wounds? Definitely not! At that moment you would believe that snake antivenom touchas serum administered immediately is needed to heal your wound. 

One of the reasons we think that time heals all wounds is that it is true that over time we do tend to bounce back from losses and disappointments. Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois did a study in which he discovered that after about five years, even widows and widowers returned to the levels of happiness they had before their spouses' passing. However, it was not the simple passage of time that healed those wounds of loss. What healed them was five years of loving and being loved, of giving and being given to, of serving and being served--that is what healed those wounds. If those widows and widowers had lived alone in a cave for those same five years, they would have emerged psychotic or dead. Our only hope is to do something besides waiting to try to heal our wounds. 

What heals our wounds here on planet earth is not time but courage and love, repentance and forgiveness. To face someone who feels rightly or wrongly that you have wounded them takes courage. You must set aside the convenient self-deception that you are a moral virgin. You must accept the fact that even though you are a good person, you may have, like Leonard Cohen’s beast with his horn, torn those who reached out to you. You must accept your failings and admit your culpability this takes guts. When you ask forgiveness for old wounds you must also be prepared to be attacked, berated, and accused for things you did and for things you did not do, and this also takes courage. 

Part of healing is forgetting. An old Buddhist legend tells the story of two monks on a journey. One day they argued over something, and one monk slapped the other in the face. The one who got slapped bent down right there took a stick and scratched this message in the sand: “Today my friend slapped me in the face.” They kept on walking and had to cross a swampy bog. The monk who had been slapped got stuck in the mud and began to sink into the muck and mire. His friend grabbed a long stick, handed it to him, and pulled him to safety. The muddy monk immediately took a stone and scratched this into the stone: “Today my friend saved my life.” That night the monk asked his companion, “After I slapped you, you wrote in the sand, and now, you write on a stone, why did you do this?” And the monk answered: “When someone hurts me, I write it in sand so that the wind and water can quickly erase it, but when someone shows me kindness I write it in stone where nothing can ever erase it.” 

The Jewish version of this universal spiritual and psychological truth is the teaching of the rabbis, “Consider every sin committed against you to be a minor sin and every sin you commit against others to be a major sin.” Buddhist or Jewish, the lesson is the same, what heals wounds is letting go of our anger and the foolish pride that seduces us into the belief that we are always the victim and never the predator. 

I think that what people really mean when they say that time heals all wounds is that patience heals all wounds, and I agree with that. Waiting does nothing, but a patient and constant effort to achieve healing will usually work because it is active, and it is wise. It takes wisdom to understand that fixing our wounds is not a sudden thing like a sword thrusting home. Rather, it is a patient thing in which the trying is much more important than the results, the journey more important than the destination, and the patience in defeat more important than the thrill of victory. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, in his “Letters to a Young Poet” wrote of this patient wisdom, “I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”