To be human is to experience situations that are painful and will leave their mark on you. It is an inevitable part of life. It is largely a matter of choosing what we choose to do about these wounds. Because there is no avoiding them, to live and breathe and experience life will lead us to be wounded in more ways than we can imagine. There will be physical challenges, mental difficulties, and emotional pains all inflicted upon us as we travel through the many paths life will propel us down. You can train, prepare and put out all the warnings we can, but wounds will always find us.  Some are huge, massively life-changing and others are small and seemingly insignificant. Still, the truth of the matter is that the only thing that will apply the right salve onto the injury is time, and it works magic on all types of pains and injuries.  Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid the scars they leave behind, and it’s how you wear them that counts. It all begins with the thoughts we entertain about our wounds, the emotions attached to those thoughts. The words we use to express our situation to the outside world and the actions we take because of all this. They will define us and decide finally if time does, in fact, heal all wounds.

Physical Scars

We all sustain injuries as a part of living. Bones get broken, ligaments snap, we sustain cuts, we are burned, and just about any other thing you can imagine.  These incidents happen by accident, and they challenge our physical abilities. Each instance marks us with a scar on our bodies, and whatever happens becomes a part.

Of our history and our story.  The physical wounds can be traumatic for sure, but they are not intentional and happen in life. They don’t tell the world anything about your personality, self-esteem, honesty, integrity, or kindness. They tell of something that happened to you from the outside.

As we age, these scars change. Sometimes they fade, sometimes they deepen and become more prominent, but they always reveal to the world one thing which has happened to us, never what is within us.  If you have survived the incident and lived to grow, care, love, and dream again, then you did quite well. The scars remind us of the strength we have within to bear the pain, overcome it and learn to live again.  Time allows this to happen, as even the deepest wound will heal if proven not to be fatal. We will recover, and time is all we need. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is the only one we have. I choose to wear the scars proudly and know I have earned every one. Time heals all wounds and leaves us a little bit wiser. But never the same.

Emotional Scars

These are tricky marks to see. Not only in others but also in ourselves. The damage is done on our insides, and the world will never know how deep or vital that wound has been. These are painful experiences we have to bear ourselves, and only those select few we choose to share them with will ever know the pain inside. But time works on these as well. The key is to deal with them, face the wounds and not let them grow and harm you on the inside.  It is a funny thing that ignoring these internal injuries doesn’t make them go away. It makes them a lasting part of your life.

When you face the things that have harmed you, then time can do its magic dance on them and allow you to move on. Like physical injuries, emotional damage always leaves a scar, and though invisible to others by sight, they are very noticeable to the feelings of others.  Sometimes the scars close us off and make other people out of bounds completely. Whatever has happened to us in the past, no matter how we were wounded, to live life, we need to move past the hurt in one way or another. If another has harmed you, then it is through forgiving those who have harmed you in the past.  Forgiveness allows you the power to heal and to take away any of the power that another person might have over you because of their behavior.

Most importantly is the act of forgiving yourself. Emotional pain will leave you a changed person, provide you with more depth, understanding, and empathy for the suffering of others. It will also leave you a vastly different person who is either destroyed by the challenges faced or learns to overcome them. It is a hell of a way to learn, but the lessons do last. They have to because when you doubt them, there are always the scars from your past to remind you. You have survived, but you are never the same.

Time Heals

When you are looking for the answers to life’s challenges and asking whatever higher power, you believe in, “Why is this happening to me?” Then you will understand yourself a little better. Often, we are sailing along in a pattern that we seem to have mastered, and life gives us these calm, serene moments, but the price is there will be moments of challenge that exist to push us to our limits and see just what exactly we are capable of.  Being pushed can be no gentle process sometimes. It will often hurt, it will leave a scar, and you will often be wounded by the acts of others and the careless, thoughtless, self-centered things they do.  Understand that the one thing life always seems to give you as a cure for wounds is time.

It is easy to understand why people today don’t like this solution to their woes and misfortune.  We live in a world of instant gratification. It would be much easier if we were like computers, and you could just run a program, and all of your pain would be taken away. But it is in the experiencing of the process of being hurt that we learn about who we are and what we are made of.  It will also lead us to the next best version of ourselves if we let it. Looking back at a painful experience can tell you where you went wrong, how to be better for it and how to avoid it in the future as well. You will be wiser but never the same.

Look at your own life and evaluate the things that have wounded you in all ways. Were there any benefits resulting from these experiences, which of course, you would much rather have avoided? The pain of loss, injury, betrayal, physical pain, and other forms of suffering leave their mark on you and cause you to change. Hopefully, it is into a better version of yourself.  That possibility always exists for you.  It begins with the thoughts you entertain, the emotions that are naturally attached to our thoughts, the words we speak to the world expressing these things, and of course, our actions that define us to the world.  Time heals all wounds, but it changes us forever as well. Who we are today will be a very different thing under the passing of time. I realize that I have been wounded and am never the same, but that is a good thing because sometimes it takes a trauma to motivate us to take the action we have to reach the destinations we are after. And time heals all wounds.

“One cannot tell when he is going to be healed, so do not try to set an exact time limit. Faith, not time, will determine when the cure will be affected.”–Paramahansa Yogananda

“Time heals many wounds, but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.”–Claire Cook

“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”  Hippocrates

“Time heals almost everything. But when you are healed, you are too old to enjoy.” —Paulo Coelho

“Time not only heals, but time also reveals.”–Karen Salmansohn