A number of …”things,” I’ll say, for lack of a more creative but vague word, happened to me along this road of life. For a number of reasons that are important to me, I don’t talk about them, other than in ambiguous terms, such as calling them “things.” But I’ll say this: those things — things that I wasn’t able to control — were pretty damn terrible. They could have destroyed me. They could have warped me. They could have robbed me of empathy, generosity, and trust. I could have learned from these things to truly and deeply hate, to become viciously determined to destroy everyone and everything that had harmed me. And others, besides.
We’ve all met people like that, haven’t we? People who’ve used terrible events in their lives as their alibi for paying terrible things forward. Or, as their reason for picking up the baton of abuse where those terrible things dropped it, and keeping it with them always, to endlessly harm themselves.
But that’s not what happened to me. Instead, as a direct result of those things, something unexpected took place: I became tenaciously, some might even say pathologically, purposeful in using these terrible things to make my life and my small world better for them. I don’t know how to explain it. It was as though, right in the middle of all the hurt, sadness, anger, pain, fear, and shock, this small voice inside of me, always managed to pipe up from under all of those emotions, and tell me: “Life is not really like this. People are not really like this.This is happening only in THIS moment.You don’t have to bring this forward. It doesn’t have to break you forever.”
This voice wasn’t a soft, benevolent voice. It was a fierce, determined voice. It would start out softly, but then, once I shook myself out of my haze of agony to listen, that voice would grow louder, and stronger. And here’s what it would say, and continues to say:
“Thank them for the negative energy. Because negative energy is still ‘energy.’ Now flip that gift of negative energy, and turn it into a powerful, positive force of energy. A force that you can use for yourself and then share with others who need it.”
That really happened. I kid you not. I don’t know why or how, but it did. And it continues to do so. And when I look back at the history of humankind, I realize that there have always been those who have taken the truly negative and made it into a pure, shining positive. Our most epic stories are not of kings who saved the world, but of the Davids who did. Not so much of the Gandalfs, but of the Frodos. The best music we know today is derived from the song of slaves singing in the fields. Women who sat in jails, starving for their rights. Nuns whose names we will never know hiding Jewish children under their long, drab habits, quietly changing history.
What do those slaves, those nameless nuns and women have in common?
That Voice that they hear. That voice of determination. Of belief that we all deserve better, that we can all be better. That we, our small selves, can make the better happen. Look around you. There is always, always someone like that. We can all be someone like that.
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