I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
Interpretation
Pain can be difficult to discuss until it has passed.
Arthur Golden's quote highlights the complex relationship we have with pain. It suggests that while we are in the midst of suffering, it might be challenging to articulate our feelings or experiences authentically. Once we have moved beyond the pain, we gain a clearer perspective, allowing us to speak more openly and honestly about it without the cloud of current suffering interfering with our thoughts and emotions.
In practice
In a support group discussing the journey of healing from trauma.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
Let nobody be afraid of true freedom of thought. Let us be free in thought and criticism; but, with freedom, we are bound to come to the conclusion that science is not antagonistic to religion, but a help to it.
There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.This creature is one's neighbor.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
I firmly believe a great many prayers are not answered because we are not willing to forgive someone.
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