Just Hold On

Fortune for the day – “Patience makes lighter what sorrow may not heal.” – Horace

I’m not sure if I like how Horace worded the fortune. I decided to look up translations of the fortune and most of the translators said things that sounded a lot like, “Just be optimistic that you are going to feel better in the future.” I suppose that is the right translation of Horace’s statement. When we are in the middle of grieving something, it sometimes feels like the grief will never end. Someone once gave me an analogy to dealing with grief which I find to be very helpful. When we first experience something that causes us pain, it is a stabbing, searing cut to our soul. It is a horrific pain, but we must allow ourselves to feel the pain, in order for it to eventually heal over, in a healthy way. If we don’t feel it and acknowledge it and cleanse it and nurse it, the grief can become a festering, infected pain that spreads all over us and spills on to others, like a disease. Some things that cause us grief, are slight, like a brush burn. They cause us pain for a brief moment, but then the event is over and the pain scabs over quickly and heals completely, and that pain is easily forgotten. Some grieving that we experience is like, initially large, deep, deep gashes, some so penetrating that they even feel life threatening. However, if just we hold on (sometimes just holding on, a much longer while, than we would like) and breathe through the pain, after a while, the gash starts to scab over. It is still tender when it is touched, but it is not nearly as painful, as the initial shock of the experience that caused us grief. Sometimes the scab will get ripped off again, by an event related to our grief, but this time we know that it will heal more quickly than the initial wound did. Finally, if we hang on long enough, the grief scab turns into a scar. The scar is always there to remind us of the pain that we experienced, but it has healed to a point where it can even be poked at, and the pain is barely felt anymore.

It’s not over ’til it’s all been said
‪It’s not over ’til your dying breath
‪So what do you want them to say when you’re gone?‬
‪That you gave up or that you kept going on?‬‪What do you do when a chapter ends?‬
‪Do you close the book and never read it again?‬
‪Where do you go when your story’s done?‬
‪You can be who you were or who you’ll become
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, ‪if it all goes wrong
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, darling just hold on

‪The sun goes down and it comes back up
‪The world it turns no matter what
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, if it all goes wrong
Darling, just hold on (Steve Aoki, Louis Tomlinson – Just Hold On (Lyrics)