Not Really the one Under Attack

After much thought and being caught without words, though I know what I ought to say, I sit to write this. It’s the only way I can think of to clearly say what I feel losing as little meaning as possible. In my experience when something is written the reader takes time to understand it but when it’s spoken it slips away.

Many times below deck Dark Star has asked me how I stay calm despite the chaos and anger. I have never given her a complete answer because it isn’t one secret thing that can be told in a sentence or it is but it takes forever to explain. Honestly, I don’t handle it. That is my secret. Someone else handles it.

I’m free to let the darts go because I’m not really the one under attack. They are miserable and lash out in a feral manor because they are wounded not because we did or said anything. I can see how hard it is to be immersed in their environment clearly seeing the damage but unable to do anything to stop it.

Harmony is a better place to live.

Acknowledging the limited role we can play in this scene is essential to surviving it. Learning our own faults and humbly asking for forgiveness is the first step toward harmony. Not holding the attacks in but letting them free in acts of kindness and mindfulness are ways we avoid being deeply wounded ourselves. By abdicating the burden to someone else and refusing to be ruled by feelings I no longer live in the hating place. It is Christ in me who is wounded and acts.

You can experience this too but the training is brutal. Life will never be simple but you will come to do and survive more than you thought possible because the burden will not be yours.

The problem I have with Vanity is that I don’t know how to be kind to her. The rest of you are more transparent to me. I know what attentions I need to pay to you. But she is isolated in a mind foreign to me; that I’ve been slow to figure out. Clearly, if this ship is to cruise forever, I must learn what kindness is to her.

It’s occurred to me that Smurfet stopped enjoying work around the time Vanity came. Watching that dynamic, their mutual jealousy, is sickening. That is the worst relationship in the room. My prescription would be for one to shut up and listen and the other to fight for herself. But these are things out of my control.

When the crisis comes I pray that I can speak my mind in love. I want to be the first on the scene. I don’t think Mother Bear understands the conflict in the same light that I do and it would be very different to have me yelling instead of her. We’re sort of used to that.

Sleep well friends I’ll see you on the morrow.