I've got a completely different view of pain these days. It's familiar now in new, physical and emotional dimensions. I've got more respect for pain, and more understanding of how little I know of it. Pregnancy and childbirth put me through my paces, but motherhood makes you feel other people's pain, too.
All the suffering that's broadcast in the news at the moment, it is all real, it all comes home. I was numb to this before. Now I understand that every infant and every adult who suffers in wars, in hunger, in poverty - they are all someone's child. This must sound familiar to any regular church-goer. Well, I'm not - but even so I have echoed the sentiment in the past, imagining that I was imagining how terrible it all was. I wasn't, I can't.
I've taken a few days off work, and it's not quite been the alcohol and caffeine-fuelled knees up that I was hoping for. A side effect of the mental decompression from just... stopping is that I've paid more attention to the reported news.
I don't really have words at the moment to think or process all of it: the Victorian-age inequalities exacerbated by welfare cuts; the utter, brain-numbing awfulness of one couple's self-serving behaviour; the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria...
Is there anything we can do?
All the suffering that's broadcast in the news at the moment, it is all real, it all comes home. I was numb to this before. Now I understand that every infant and every adult who suffers in wars, in hunger, in poverty - they are all someone's child. This must sound familiar to any regular church-goer. Well, I'm not - but even so I have echoed the sentiment in the past, imagining that I was imagining how terrible it all was. I wasn't, I can't.
I've taken a few days off work, and it's not quite been the alcohol and caffeine-fuelled knees up that I was hoping for. A side effect of the mental decompression from just... stopping is that I've paid more attention to the reported news.
I don't really have words at the moment to think or process all of it: the Victorian-age inequalities exacerbated by welfare cuts; the utter, brain-numbing awfulness of one couple's self-serving behaviour; the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria...
Is there anything we can do?
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