Lessons in Tragedy

As the news circulates and I hear from my Boulder loved ones that they are OK, my thoughts are brought past the shock of another tragedy that seems so intentional, and so ridiculously unnecessary.

Living within miles of Columbine High School, the STEM school in Highlands Ranch, and the Aurora theater shooting, all of us in Denver understand the deep wrenching of the soul that shakes your feeling of safety to its core.

All of us who remember human-induced tragedies do.

It shatters so much in an instant.

Eleven families have been shattered this week.

Working with teens honed sharp recognition of the angst that seeps so deeply into young souls that seem to drive this kind of action. It is the same anger that drives adults to take horrific steps to assert their anger shrouded as opinion, judgement, revenge, and bias on all sides of the political aisle. It is a drive to wound, destroy, and dominate.

Fear emanates from parents of troubled teens as they try to love and support their kids back to resilience in the face of life’s nasty remarks, toxic incidents, and people who have thoroughly broken their trust.

I understand that feeling of helplessness.

I have been that family terrified that my child was the one harmed.

I have been that parent trying to soothe the child reeling from the lockdown and fear of the shadows on the window as she huddled with classmates trying to become small.

I have been that teacher seeing raw fear at the slightest irregularity in the weeks that followed.

And, I have been that mother who held my child in my arms as she grew cold, with tears of blood slipping down her face.

Life is beautiful.  Life is harsh…  and life is complex, uncertain, and sacred.

As a woman I admire said, WE DO NOT GET TO KNOW.

We only get to choose how we show up, how we carry these experiences, and how we go on. Bitterness and anger are easily absorbed and hard to banish. We are all wronged somehow.

Where we control our path is whether we fall fully to our fears and become hypervigilant and suspicious, or whether we choose courage to face our journey with joy and light.

This is not naivete that life will be a cakewalk if I wish it to be. I have been in devastation. Our neurobiology is affected by everything we experience. We are altered by it. Even pain feels more intense after a negative experience (nocebo hyperalgesia). Trauma has real impacts on our future life, and this is not an effort to diminish the gravity of that.

Rather, it is a choice to be part of the brightness that throws the shadows into contrast in the same painting. It is a choice to live in the light rather than huddling in the inevitable dark places. It is a choice to face the impact of the traumas that are inevitable and a refusal to give in to the fear that my natural instincts urge in a new landscape of danger. It is a choice to use my thinking cortex with respect and understanding of my emotional center.

Does that make me a target when the bullets fly? Perhaps.

But when I become part of the light the dark shrinks, even if it is deeper than sin.

I choose light. My thinking cortex thinks so too.

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