Just as we can physically wound ourselves in minutes but we may need months to get back to normal, so too with our emotions. Hurt comes fast, healing takes time. Often, we are so consumed by our hurt that we forget to give ourselves the time and space to heal, and sometimes we just don’t know how to overcome the hurt we are living with.

Healing starts when we reflect and realise what needs to be healed. Somebody’s words or actions may have hurt us, we have little control over changing them. But we do have control over how we allow it to impact us. When we are hurt, we are healing a bruised ego of expectations.

Sometimes people closest to us tend to hurt us the most. Not because they are necessarily sharper with us, but because we tend to be more sensitive to their behaviour towards us. Sometimes small things said or done can become big. The longer we hold onto it and the more we keep reminding ourselves, the bigger it becomes in our mind. Healing starts by dropping small things before they take deep roots within.

Sometimes small things over time snowball and we suddenly snap, not because the issue was big, but over time small issues had been building up within which we had not resolved. When we bottle up things and silently hurt within, at some point we may crack under pressure. Healing starts when we have open and sometimes difficult conversations.

Often things are not perceived and understood the way they were meant. Misunderstandings have a strange way of becoming reality and hurting us, just because our pride and hurt prevented us from taking the first step. Healing starts when we drop our pride.

We may want others close to us to change, but the fact is the only person we have control over to change is ourselves. When we constantly agitate internally as to why someone is the way they are, we don’t realise it, but we are feeding what we don’t like about them rather than appreciating the several wonderful things in them. Healing starts with acceptance.

Over time we change, people change and circumstances change. What seemed big then may look trivial now. When we look back and find the ability to laugh at our own past hurts, we know we have truly healed. Healing starts when we stop taking ourselves too seriously in life.

When we rise above our hurts, we unlock something within. As difficult as it may be, healing starts when we find it in ourselves to think well of the person who has hurt us. It is not a sign of weakness, it takes great strength to find empathy and compassion in our hurt.

Life is moving too fast and we already find it hard to find the precious time for the joyful things we want to do. We need to guard ourselves against hurt entering our system because hurt will come fast, but healing may take a long time.

(Picture – Lades Braed walk in St.Andrews, Scotland)