Raise Your Words

"Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder." 

― Rumi, Persian poet

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Dear Kate,

As a man of letters there are words in our everyday use that I don't know the meaning of, and "trauma" is one of them.

I don't mean there is no clinical definition that I can easily look up: I mean I don't know what people mean when they use the word.  And it gets worse when the word thunders away from its stem form to bloom like flower: traumatic, traumatize, traumatizing etc.

If I use the words the way I heard them used I would say being a parent is the most traumatizing thing that could ever happen to a person.  Argue with me if you like: the linguistic slope is slippery; see who will go down first.

An example.  Do you drive?  Do you drive in heavy traffic?  Rainy and often very dark traffic, like now and forever in Vancouver?  Have you ever been in an accident, a serious one, airbag coming out and all?  Even if not, you might have likely seen one, in a movie, in the news, in the always new and moving sights and sounds of your chronic imagining?

I've seen bad things in my head, things that did happen, might have happened, could happen, should happen if life is what it threatens to be: full of dangers and sorrows, setbacks that set you back to a fetal curl, your first tears, begging to be unborn, stuffs that kill you off for good with no remorse or recourse.

Well, if I ever get myself into such trouble on the road and there is still a phone call to be made, I would call for an ambulance.  Such a phone call I did made once.  After that I called my parents, affirming them that I was still here, this side of eternity, that our connection however tenuous was somehow miraculously preserved.  I made a wrong turn: someone with a right mind and kind heart decided to not count it against me.

Has my father ever imagined such a phone call from this son?  Was his imagining chronic, eating up his breathing energy, menacing his daily hope, subverting the fundamentals of a flourishing life?  Does his heart skip a beat whenever the phone rings and my number displays?

Sometimes I don't know how I manage, how any parent manages to skip heartbeats and keep on living.  Before life--as in both senses of the preposition--there is death.  Traumatized?  What traumatized?  If there ever is a less heightened state in contrast for me to feel any differently.

Yours, Alex