Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that even painful experiences can hold a sense of nostalgia or value.
Sebastian Junger's quote reflects on the complex emotions associated with trauma and nostalgia. It implies that the experiences we endure during challenging times, such as war, leave lasting impacts, and that the memories tied to these experiences, no matter how painful, can evoke a longing for the intensity and camaraderie of those moments, despite the suffering they may have caused.
In practice
This quote can be used to spark discussions on the psychological effects of war during a veterans' gathering.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one anotherβs lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
The cause doesn't have to be righteous and battle doesn't have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.
When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.
In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence , an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?
I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They're the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They're taking most of the risks. They're absorbing most of the casualties. And they're the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.
Kindness is produced by kindness.
Simplicity is the essence of universality.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to 'build nations.' And when we cannot be sure how to improve the world, hubristic visions pose a grave danger.
The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.