Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [52]
Silence teaches you many things. It teaches you how to listen and how to hear. It teaches you how to feel and how to translate into words what you are feeling. When you can’t translate what you are feeling, silence allows you to go deeper into yourself and find the peace that surpasses understanding. A peace that enables you to move forward, even when you don’t understand. Most of the time, silence is a good thing. But there are those times and circumstances when silence will kill you. A killing silence can destroy your identity and your spirit. It can kill your heart and your soul. When silence is used as a means of avoiding something you know you must deal with, it will murder your sense of worth. When you use silence to hide the truth, to avoid the truth, or to color the truth, it is the same as saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It demonstrates your belief that people who tell the truth don’t matter.
But they do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
What’s the Lesson When You’ve Been Taught That You Are Unlovable?
Conflict is simply a result of something getting in the way of the forward flow of life. This happens when you see yourself as being incomplete in some way, and so you are trying to add something to help you feel more complete. Those who are always using others to satisfy their needs or purpose are always filled with conflict.
Tom Johnson, in You Are Always Your Own Experience
SOMETIMES YOU NEED SOMETHING to bring you back to reality. Like a bucket of ice-cold water dumped on your head. I heard pounding on the bathroom door. It was the dog, again. I was convinced that she was crazy. I needed to get rid of her and get myself an honest, God-fearing mutt. Now she was banging on the door. If I had to get out of the tub, I was going to kill that dog! Okay, she’s dead! Dripping wet, I yanked the door open to find my very expensive, very dumb dog eating my brand-new red suede shoes. I hadn’t even taken the paper out of them yet. She had. There were tiny pieces of white tissue paper strewn all over the bedroom floor. China, the dog, was lying at the entrance of the bathroom with the tip of my shoe in her mouth and her hind legs inside the shoe. I knew that if I reached down, I was going to strangle this dog. If I wasn’t such a shoe diva, I might have thought she looked cute. But I was, and right now she didn’t look cute, she looked like dead meat!
Just as I bent down and extended my arms in her direction, my husband appeared. “Oh, oh, China! You’re gonna get yourself in trouble.” He didn’t even seem to notice that I was buck naked and dripping wet.
“I thought you were working or bathing or something,” he said.
“I was remembering,” I said. He took the shoe from the dog.
“You go on and finish up. I’ll put her away.” He always knows just what to say. God! He is such a blessing.
Heading back to the bathtub, I noticed that the lump in my throat was gone. I was beginning to feel better. My boundaries were getting clearer. But I still had a ways to go, and the water was still warm.
Beanie was devastated when her mother died. Aunt Nadine had been in and out of the hospital for over a year before she passed on, and Rhonda had become used to her absence. She felt little compassion for Beanie and no grief whatsoever. She watched the aunts and uncles and cousins cry their eyes out at the funeral; then watched as they returned to Aunt Nadine’s immaculate house, got drunk, and started fighting as though it were just another Saturday night.
Rhonda retreated to her room with Baby, the cat. Suddenly, she saw Grandma and Daddy standing in front of her. Only they weren’t really there. The platters of food and the big black