Light is a most beautiful symptom of healing

​As I live out the rest of my days and hopefully years, I will point my days and years toward healing.

Healing me.

Healing others.

I have this story that I share, an example of sorts, when I'm speaking about a child's developing brain. The example is of an infant waking in the middle of the night, crying out, afraid of the dark. And of a dad, me, tired from many endless nights of sleeplessly tending to infancy. I know there are parents who can relate.

I say there are two possible responses from this dad.

One, I march angrily down the hall toward the crying infant with an intense focus on getting MY sleep. I will possibly stand in the doorway of the room, loud, threatening that child to get to sleep or else.

I suppose many us sleepless parents have lived out some form of that example.

My point is not to judge our worst parenting moments, but to help us understand, if that becomes our primary response to a child's fear of the dark, they will not only develop a more intense fear of the dark, they will come to fear the monster in the doorway far more than that dark.

Predicting that you will add more dark to their darkness will become the pattern of your child's brain.

The other response, of course, is to simply recognize and cherish the child's fear. To recognize what they need most in that moment is to feel safe. So in spite of your sleeplessness you hold and assure that child, that even in the dark, things will be okay. In which case the child will eventually come to know the dark as something they will navigate safely, and you as someone that will lovingly help them do the navigating.

Predicting that you will add light to their darkness will become the pattern of their brain.

I am reflecting on that example this morning as I write this in the context of my own fear of the dark. My own fear of my own darkness.

For most of my life, I have stood in the doorway of my darkness yelling at me, threatening me, shaming and guilting me. I have looked into the darkness of my life and been a monster of a parent over my own darkness.

And over time, I came to fear nothing more than my darkness and the me who has tended to it.

In recent years, however, I have come to understand, with the help of some loving and caring people, that healing lives in that darkness. And that light is a most beautiful symptom of healing.

I have come to understand that I can no longer stand in the doorway of my darkness, like a monster, and abuse myself over all the choices and experiences that I layered into that darkness.

I need to go meet myself there, with kindness and compassion, replacing monster tales with compassion tales, and in spite of my decades of sleeplessness, assure myself, that even in the dark, things will be okay.

Savannah Rae Bohlin says, "that is why you feel such an intimacy with darkness, because it is fuel for your light."

And so it is there, in my darkness, in studying all that it has to tell me, that I free myself to become more intimate with the darkness of others. Because the truth is, that in itself is what prevents so many of us from becoming close to one another, close to anyone, really, our fear of the dark.

Of ours and of each other's.

We would much rather hang out with each other in the light. But light is a symptom of healing. And healing is found in the dark.

We must quit being monsters to one another's darkness.

We must replace our monster tales with compassion tales.

We must all become students of the dark, on the way to becoming healers.