What Does It Mean to Face Your Problems?

Wouldn't it be easier to avoid facing one's problems?  Even suffering is easier than facing one's problems -- for a while.  Eventually we put on our big girl or big boy pants and deal with things.  Here's a poem I wrote on the topic in 2005 about things that had happened years earlier.  Here it is years later and there are still many things that need facing - probably always will be.

FACING IT

 "Maybe you never get over anything. You just find a way of carrying it as gently as possible."  -- Bronwen Wallace

Facing it is deciding not to wipe blood off the floor

Well, not so much deciding, as letting it sit there, declaring itself.

          Facing it is sitting alone, 

          watching your 8-year-old play baseball

          in a park on a sunny day

          And when she makes her way around the bases, you think

                   If this is as good as it gets –

                   This is pretty good.

          Facing it is saying to a new lover,

          “What makes your life meaningful?”

          And if he says, “My gun collection,”

          disarming him with a smile

          and cancelling the next date.

          Facing it is seeing it in others

          – an isolated student or neighbour

          entombed in anger

          on the verge of explosion.

          So you listen, just listen – 

           a candle in a cave.

          Then facing it is writing it

          telling it

          to yourself, to another

          to the world.

          Facing it is accepting it

          with compassion and grace

          letting your heart grow wider

          and eventually

          scrubbing the blood off the floor

          packing up and moving on

                   and carrying it with you,

                     . . . gently