Well, I drank a high caffeine beverage too late, could not sleep and was reading social media and I think part of what makes it so depressing this this:
What (some) people do is this: They take their pain, make it the “truth” then spread it out and package it up as “wisdom”.
And some of these pain professors have big platforms and millions of people tune in to gain insights from them.
For some of us:
- If you take the pain away, we do not have much else to talk about.
- Pain becomes a measure of acceptance, like if you haven’t experienced trauma to X degree you are not one of us
Let me be clear: I am not diminishing anyone’s pain or tell anyone not to share theirs. In fact, I encourage people to be open and share with us. We get to know them and we also get the opportunity to show them empathy, love and support as they deal with it. Our listening also lets them know that there are people out there who care about them!
However, we need to NOT try and spread our pain like it is some universal rule that we all need to live by.
You see…pain is just pain: It is not wisdom and it is not true for everyone.
When you think about it, nothing is ever really gained from pain itself other than teaching us to not put our finger back in the light socket.
You see, pain only guides us on what NOT to do or how NOT to live, it is not very instructive, not very creative or offer us any wisdom beyond that.
We as black people need to stop reliving our pain and treating it like OUR truth because then it never goes away. We keep our generational trauma alive because we keep living our pain like it is the truth, like it is OUR truth and that is what will exist beyond our lifetime.
Is this what we are committed to? Is this what we want for future generations?
I don’t think it is!
PAIN is not our truth, it is NOT who we are, nor is it how we are supposed to live.
Pain is the lever that is used to divide us. It makes us victims of each other, gives us tools to hit each other with and bombs to throw at each other and sometimes LITERALLY! It is destroying our communities because our children know this: To be happy, they cannot live HERE!
Why should they when the adults are creating pain as the truth, offer them not much else and THEN tell them “this is just how it is”?
I don’t want to live there either!
We begin to create something powerful when we wake up in the morning, grab our coffee (or tea) and greet the sunshine with new eyes. It is ok to be informed by our pain (YES: light sockets are not where fingers belong) but we should NOT create our world by being guided by it or living in it.
As we wake up this Easter Morning, remember that Christ did not sacrifice himself on the cross to keep us in bondage and in pain, he did this to set us free.
Let’s put the past back in the past and create something new!
So: What are YOU creating today?
Quiet Thunder 
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