Living With What Cannot Be Changed

Our society wishes us to believe that, given enough time, everything eventually heals. Pain is expected to soften, memories are supposed to lose their sharpness, and the scars left by difficult experiences are expected to fade away as life moves forward. 

But this is not how our universe shaped us over the millennia.

There are experiences from which we can never completely recover. The grief of losing someone we deeply loved may remain with us as long as we remain conscious. 

A betrayal may permanently alter the way we look at a relationship, while a failure or humiliation may continue to occupy a small corner of our memory long after the event itself has lost its relevance.

Yet the permanence of a wound does not necessarily mean that our life has to remain defined by it.

Accepting that it has become part of our story is perhaps a more difficult form of healing than making the pain disappear. We can never return to being the person we were before a particular loss or disappointment, and trying to do so may simply keep us looking backwards when life has already moved forward.

Life has moved on, and so have we.

Acceptance does not mean giving in or simply putting the experience out of our mind. Rather, it means refusing to let the event—or the person involved—continue to control or affect our lives. Something can remain important without remaining in control of our lives.

Some things are simply painful, unfair or irreversible. Accepting that reality can nevertheless free us from the exhausting expectation that we must somehow repair what cannot be repaired.

In that sense, acceptance can become a form of moksha: a kind of liberation, a breaking free from the cycle of pain and attachment.

An authentic life is not one in which everything has been healed. It is one in which we recognise what cannot be changed.

This is in response to the prompt: Friday Writings #247: Reframing Negative Concepts

If It’s Just a Body, Let My Words Linger

 

Image generated by Gemini

The moment you die, your identity becomes a body. Today I came across that thought, and it felt quietly humbling.

It took me back to a cold day in February, a few decades ago — to the day I rushed home from Delhi, the wind slicing through the airport glass, my mind racing faster than the wheels beneath me. My father had suffered a stroke. The flight was delayed by Delhi’s infamous fog, and by the time I reached home, he had already left this world.

Everyone waited for him to come home. I expected to see my father — strong, tired, gentle all at once. For years he had been a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle, a friend, a colleague — many things to many people. But when he arrived, no one said his name. No one called out a relation.

They said, “The body is here.”

In that instant, language stripped love of its titles. My father — a voice, a laugh, a presence that filled rooms — was now the body.

The body we idolize, critique, measure, compare and mold is, in many ways, deeply mechanical. It takes in breath, food, admiration, comfort — all the good things life offers — and when it releases, it releases what it no longer needs. Everything that leaves the body in its natural course — even through our skin, our eyes, our breath — is something unwanted.

And yet, there is one exception.

This very body has the ability to release something that is not waste, not toxin, not discard. Through the tongue, we can offer kindness, compassion, gentleness, truth. We can speak warmth into cold moments and remind someone they matter.

Perhaps that is how we outlive ourselves — not through the body that is eventually reduced to silence, but through the words it once carried.

If it’s just a body, let my words linger.

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