Time Heals

Taking a break from writing my massive paper. I feel like I am in good shape now - over half-way done and a whole three more days before it's due! And I always maintain that starting is the hardest part - once I start writing, it generally flows pretty well. I just wish this was my last big assignment of the semester, but it is only the first. Anyway, I was driving to the store a little while ago (another break from writing) and a song came on my CD player that used to have major emotional attachment for me. In other words, every time I heard it, I would cry. I had associated it with a guy that I came very close to marrying. After we broke up, I couldn't bear to hear the song, it just hurt too much. I guess I have a song like that for every serious relationship I've been in. It was a few years ago now that we broke up, but I still remember it as one of the extremely difficult times in my life. I was hurt very badly, and in a lot of pain for a long time. So it was interesting to me today, when the song started playing, that it didn't make me sad. It didn't hurt to hear. I actually could laugh that I was once in so much pain. Because time has give me a lot of perspective, and I have grown and changed so much in that time, that I look back and am now thankful that things didn't work out, rather than feeling hurt by the experience. It's incredible how much time heals wounds, and changes your perspective on things. In the moment, things can hurt so much, but later you can look back and laugh. I just wish it was easier to do the laughing at the same time as the hurting, because it seems that would be easier. But I do know that the pain that you go through leads to growth, and it's that growth that allows us to laugh. It's a process that we have to go through sequentially. There are so many cliches that we say to try to help our friends who are hurting - "time heals all wounds," "that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger," and "life goes on." It's not always easy to hear these things, but they are true. The hard part is working through it all to get to the point where you can hear that song and laugh.