Avoiding or Facing Life

That which we refuse to face comes to haunt us in other forms. It is the dri­ving force in our com­pul­sions — large or small. The secret we do not tell our­selves, that we know we know but are afraid of admit­ting, turns into our lit­tle neu­rotic traits. Our quirks are mes­sen­gers from our soul telling us what we are try­ing to avoid. We ignore them and try to go on. It becomes more obvi­ous to oth­ers than our­selves.
In Pat Conroy’s book Prince of Tides, he tells of a fam­ily trau­ma­tized by strangers. They are intent on not let­ting any­one know what hap­pened, but it has a way of com­ing out on them any­way. The boys are more ner­vous. The daugh­ter does not notice that she is wear­ing her dress inside out. They all seem to have blank stares. They have taken some­thing hor­ri­ble and buried it, so that they will not lose face. Not being able to talk about it means they will express it in other ways.
I never cease to be amazed by how much emo­tional pain peo­ple can carry and still func­tion. Yes, it causes them (us) to be odd — some­times even down­right weird. Still, they go on in life. They are admirable peo­ple. We too would act the same way, given the same cir­cum­stances.
There are oth­ers that avoid life because they lack courage. They are self-absorbed, but not because they have had to face some ter­ri­ble trauma. They just look for the easy way out of every stress of life. We find our­selves a lit­tle short on patience with them. We can sense that they are “bury­ing their tal­ent” as Jesus reflected in one of his para­bles. They have opted for com­fort­able secu­rity over the rugged adven­ture of truly liv­ing. Their pri­mary agenda is to get every­one else to carry their lit­tle emo­tional bur­dens. It does not work. They end up very lonely and afraid of life.
Face what­ever has hap­pened to you. Tackle today’s dis­ap­point­ments. Lift your eyes to antic­i­pate things you can­not con­trol. Run into life and not away from it. Fac­ing beats avoid­ing — no mat­ter how painful.