Forever Different

Window at Tangiers - Matisse
Originally uploaded by Adagio.

Apropos a comment expressed in response to my last post, The Resetting of Broken Bones, I wanted to consider the notion that a broken bone might reset, but crookedly. Healed, but forever different.

It is very easy to measure our own healing against a plumbline of the past. To expect that recovery from whatever experience led to our broken state will culminate in our acting, thinking and feeling exactly as we had previously. This is quite plainly nonsense. Taken to an extreme, it infers that the experiences of life do not influence the evolution of the individual.

Looking back at the person I was at age twenty-eight, I would be absolutely horrified at the thought of living today within the confines of the person I was at that time. The experiences of my life have led me along an often painful dog-legged path that has produced awareness of things I never even considered at twenty-eight.

To illustrate this point, I include an excerpt from a particularly introspective exercise in writing about one aspect of my life:

The degree to which I am physically dependent grows progressively. Yet, as if to defy all sensibility, there is a corresponding measure of significant personal expansion. Could I have achieved this personal development without the physical parallel? I would like to shout a resounding Yes! to that question but in truth, I fear the answer may in fact be no. That is particularly hard to acknowledge. It adds insult to injury. It challenges both my deepest longings to be free from physical shackles and the import I attribute to such freedom.

I guess I might explain the expanse in my thinking and latterly awakened awareness as the consequence of broken bones that have crookedly reset. Healed, but forever different.

Footnote: I would like to acknowledge that comments made by Actress with Attitude provided inspiration for this particular train of thought.