7/21/2019 Time the Greatest Healer

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Time is the greatest healer

Be it a scratch on the bark of a tree or a bruise on a person’s knee, time heals almost all wounds.Human beings are emotional creatures that are in a loop when they are alive. A loop of emotions thatthey go through their entire lives. Loss of loved ones, unrequited love, unsuccessful missions orambitions, sacrifices, betrayals, accidents, traumas and tragedies. A human goes through so manysituations where he might feel it is impossible for him to come up from it. But mostly he does. Woundsheal with time, whether they are physical or emotional.

But even as time passes one might not be able to cope up with the loss one has suffered. Will poweris a gift that aids time in healing wounds. Here too both physical and emotional. If one has the will to

survive a tough time one can even come out stronger than before. On August 6, 1945 two atomic bombswere dropped over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans. On August 6, 1945,during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomicbomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city andimmediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Threedays later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radioaddress on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

Now, Hiroshima is an important industrial city with a population of 1.1 million. It built itself strongerthan before. Today there are more than eighty five thousand elderly people of modern Hiroshima arepeople who are survivors of the bomb.

In November 2008, 10 Pakistani members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic militant organisation,carried out a series of 12 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across Mumbai.The attacks, which drew widespread global condemnation, began on Wednesday, 26 November andlasted until Saturday, 29 November 2008, killing 164 people and wounding at least 308. If you walk thesame streets in today’s date, the place looks unaffected. The Chhatrapatti Shivaji Terminus is lit up andthe busy life continuous in the same place where the horrifying incident took place. Time has here againacted as the greatest healer. But we mustn’t forget that it is human after all that decides to move onand come back stronger.

Although I could agree that some wounds never heal. Maybe one just feels less affected by it asother situations rise up and take more of one’s attention. For example, there is chronological time (the

Greeks called it chronos time). It’s the clock ticking away, and everything we do to get our activities ofdaily life going. It’s planning, tasking, working, busying, completing, etc. Often chronos time keeps usmoving fast and busy so that we hardly notice what we are feeling. This kind of functioning in time oftenleads to injury, because we can’t really notice what is happening. We’re numb. But there is also sacredtime (kairos time in the greek). Kairos time is when we slow way down and start to notice what isactually happening inside and outside of ourselves. It is about paying attention, becoming more mindfuland open to experience. If time heals, it is kairos time that heals, because we are in it with a fullerawareness, rather than being pulled away from ourselves by the ticking of the clock in chronos time. Inthat case, no matter how much time has passed once a person does have the time to pay attention tohis previous loss, which he hasn’t had the time to address, the pain of that loss maybe be far more than

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before. In my personal experience I have been in situations where I have thought that some difficulttime that has past may not bother me much in the future, but I stand corrected about that thought.Some of us are more emotional than others, every human being is different, as is every situation. A lot

of people need to mourn in order to adjust to whatever loss he or she has faced. And not mourning mayresult in more emotional trauma in the future. Human psychology is tricky. Again, we have to be carefulabout pushing people to “let go,” or “forget.” In fact, grief is a natural and unlearned healing process.People wanting to be helpful to those who are grieving do not give pat answers to profound questions.They do less advising and more listening. They understand the meaning of memories. Memories are notdead. Memories are alive and dynamic. Memories help people retain their needed connection to thedeceased. The old idea about grief was that we should encourage people to cut their t ies and move on.Well, it doesn’t usually really work that way. People need to feel free to remember, and grieve. Asfriends, we need to provide a safe place for people who are in mourning. A place where they can feelthe intensity and depth of their feelings without being judged or pushed by someone else with anagenda. Done this way, the grief process usually allows the person to slowly come to terms with theirloss and then begin considering withdrawing some of the emotional energy they are putting out to thelost loved one and redirecting it toward other relationships or causes. Perhaps the reason it is so hardfor us to forget the people we love is because we are not designed to forget the people we love, but weare pressured to do so by others who may be well-intentioned, but not understanding.

Therefore, you never know which old wound affects when and how in your life in the future. In suchsituations time might just make situations worse. The longer the loss has been curbed the worst itsaffects later on. One must be very careful when hurting another person on purpose, because time maynot heal the pain caused by them.

Time in itself then—unlucky for us—does not heal all wounds. Lilly Tomlin said, “Tragedy plus timeequals comedy.” There’s something to that. We can all look back at certain hard or painful situations inlife and laugh now about them. But the main point is time is just a concept we use to measure minutes,

days, hours, months, years. Time is not a healer. The passage of time may take the edge off of acutepain, but it does not heal pain. On the other hand, time can be used well for healing purposes. Whentime is used well, in terms of healing wounds, then it is because we do something specific with andwithin it. We take time and shape it in order to do inner work. It is inner work coupled with courage andhonesty that heals all wounds.

To conclude, I would say that time may be the greatest healer, but not every wound can behealed by time.