Skeletons Under Your Bed: Do You Have Any?

Photo by Chris Charles on Unsplash

Everyone of us has witnessed momentary ‘blackouts’ of vision or encountered deja vu times, those times that call for somebody to shine a torchlight into the nooks and crannies of your personal space. Yes, nobody likes to remember the crappiest days of their lives. For some people, however, exposure therapy could actually make things better rather than worse. Exposure therapy refers to a form of mental coping mechanism that involves being presented with a personal fear. Whether this is arachnophobia (the fear of spiders), being constantly told to do something you hate, distasteful food items (natto beans or sauerkraut) or climbing staircases (bathmophobia) we all have things that we would much rather keep to ourselves.

Although head-on confrontation is not everybody’s forte (originating from Latin the term means something that somebody is good at) it definitely makes arguments and conflicts easier to deal with. One stellar example is how the current Eastern European war has driven a positive uptick in altruistic behavior. People are donating money to charities they may never have heard of or been worried about being swindled from. Elsewhere in the world, there are relentless tirades of fighting in the emergency units of hospitals just to help another person breathe for one day more.

Recalling my primary education, there was a course in Citizenship & Character Formation teaching us how to become good stewards of the community, to practice environmental conscientiousness as well as to impart positive messages toward those whom may not confer with our specific points of view. An elderly mentor once told me that “If we do not learn from the best, then we will continue to regress, like stagnant water in a flower pot and basically disintegrate together with the minute still-breeding mosquito that might have hovered there for a moment too long. “

For whatever it might be worth, our society is changing at an unprecedented pace. This week we have the Korean and French presidential campaigns to be excited about (if you’re following current affairs that is) as well as global rise in oil prices en par with the greenback and celebrity news thrown into the mix. Only when we relive those moments we hated the most, the parts of us that we fought to cover up, the secrets even God would find capricious, then we would be able to proudly declare that our battles are not altogether forsaken. So in spite of knowing that few of us rarely get a second chance at this race, either to make peace with our old selves or to find purpose in a novel undertaking, maybe we can take those broken skeletal parts and turn them into something new?

It’s just some food for thought.

Let’s all chew on that for a moment.