02/22/2023
Healing is very serious business. In the English language, the word “Heal” and the word “Whole” share a common etymological root; both words derive from a proto-Germanic term that means “to bind, to put things together”.
To “heal” is, very literally, to become “whole”. The process of healing is the process of recovering all the parts of ourselves that have become lost or fragmented along the way in this wild ride we call life.
For many adults, that fragmentation relates quites directly to the suppression of our child-like qualities, ways of being in the world that aren’t quite compatible with a society of obedient consumers and conformist workers.
Play and leisure are highly pathologised yet integral parts of what it means to be a healthy and happy human being. As any creative person will tell you, humans need a lot of time to “just lay around and do nothing”.
In societies that highly value productivity and competition, we are primed to glorify our own exploitation, our identities often built around a central core of what we do for work, often feeling proud of sacrificing basic needs such as sleep for the sake of overworking ourselves into illness.
Capitalism has taught us that our self-worth is contingent with our productivity. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with working hard or even enjoying what we do. The real problem is that nagging, anxiety-inducing voice in the back of our head that constantly says: “I should be doing something else right now, I don’t deserve to rest, have fun, or spend time with family and friends.” What I really should be doing is writing another paper, covering another shift, working on that website, putting in an extra couple of hours at work.
Truth is, Healing Culture is steeped deep into the same work ethics that our enveloping cultures glorify. Even the language that we use reflects the way we think: Healing is contingent with “doing our work”. It is such an unfortunate cliché.
For the most part, we feel that “healing” has to be hard, painful and difficult. We believe that healing has to be messy, self-absorbed, performative, public, and a result of us “really doing our work”. And, well, sometimes it is. But that’s not the whole story.
Healing and “doing our work” cannot and should not be the same thing. That’s the kind of exploitative thinking that we need to heal from in the first place. Healing requires that we remember to be playful, that we recover our child-like sense of wonder, that we laugh loudly and abundantly, mostly at ourselves and our absurd little dramas, which are simultaneously incredibly important and utterly insignificant.
Humility puts everything into perspective and allows to approach this paradox with strength, courage, levity and compassion for ourselves and others.
