Scars, Wounds and Pain

Maybe you have sometimes had the same feeling I´m having now: the doors behind are closed, the new ones in the front have not yet opened.

Feelings and experiences like that come and go. That´s what life has taught to us. That´s what we learn willingly or by force. Sometimes you wait with happy expectation the new doors to open. Sometimes you would not mind whether they open or not. The grey November with short days and bare trees does not shake or push you in any way towards a bright and inviting future. - Just read how Tobias describes our present mental-climatic conditions in his blog in Spanish.

I was in Bosnia last week. Their days get dark at about five in the afternoon, but their mornings open up in full daylight sometime between six and seven. It is a difference that makes a difference, as Gregory Bateson has said.

What was alike in Bosnia? People´s dreams - the ones they want to become true as well as the ones they have had to give up. Some buildings were in ruins, others had their skeleton left standing up, almost all were scarred, as if they had measels. If there were no traces of the war, they were brand-new or still under construction.

Shopwindows told their own stories about people´s shared dreams as well - elegant clothes, shoes, handbags, shiny jewelry, inviting furniture...

It is very limiting not to be able to communicate with people, especially when you now that every single place, object and incident has a story to tell. The overall coverage of stories has been underlined by Gregory Bateson:

"... the fact of thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of the redwood forests and sea anemones." (Mind and Nature, ISBN: 0-553-34575-3)

In Bosnia, when you do not know the language and when you have just a minimal knowledge of the history of the region, you miss a lot of the stories. Somehow you just see the text with punctuation marks, but you have to guess what has been actually written down. There are scars and echoes in the surroundings, but you have to create the content yourself. The cemeteries are visible, but the wounded people remain somewhere out of sight. All violence causes wounds, no matter how much effort we make to hide it.

I think we transform wounds into pain just to hide our wounds from others. Pain is personal. Wounds are social. When something hurts you really badly, the hurt and pain become so personal and so intime that you start thinking that your hurt and wounds rob you the right to be a full, respectable and respected member of the society.

In a way we tend to misinterpret the situation: instead of taking the right to scream out your pain, to make it public and shared, to point out the real source of the wrong, you keep quiet. Little by little your personal pain makes you hate the body that still carries the wound. The remedy you have is that the pain may become too intense and simply requires to be shared. In favourable circumstances this is the point when you can get rid of both the pain and the wound.

There is no way to organise human life without organising power relations between people, no matter whether it is a question about relations between individuals, groups of people or nations.
Normally we negotiate on how power is divided, how power relations in various situations should change. As a result of this normal negotiation-based approach to life we have well-functioning couples, families, organisations, nations, international relations. We may talk loud and shout, but in principle we still negotiate.

All violence is social. It is based on refusing to negotiate. Violence results in scarred buildings as well as wounded people hiding their wounds in their personal pain. We can just wonder what makes power so tasty and tempting that those who have it so easily and naturally take out their guns, fists and muscular force to beat their weaker ones.

One thing we should know is that when somebody has been beaten there is no need to beat him/her again. We need all our shared energy and talent to rebuild what has been destroyed. The doors to the past are closed. It is not the path that makes us walk. When doors to the future open, we beat the path. Spanish speaking people would say: Con pan y con vino, bien anda el camino. And you know the Spanish - all they do, is done with friends and relatives around. It means sharing.

It is interesting that in the Finnish language we do not have any equivalent for the English word ´share´. But it is equally interesting that we neither have any equivalent for the word ´looser´.

In the normal life in Finland we make mistakes, we have difficulties and hardship, and we fail. But that does not make us loosers. Mistakes and failures become true on the level of behaviour. Not on the level of our identity. We might have experienced terrible and disgusting things, but that does not make us anyhow second-rate people. That is why we in the Finnish language do not need the word ´looser´. On the identity level we remain intact. No matter what may have happened, we are valuable human beings.

Just got a fresh comment from Mostar. All this takes place on the street where the United World College is. Samuli does not know exactly what happened. Some people were killed, others wounded. We all should be in pain. See the video.