The Necessary Act of Decomposition
healing could take forever....and that's okay
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The Necessary Act of Decomposition
Growth is an essential part of living but what about decomposition? Decomposition is the other side of life. It’s the letting go, the turning over and turning into something else. Decomposition is essential to the life cycle as it creates the fodder for the primary consumers of the world, the plants, to grow. Without decomposition there would be no new growth. We’d be stuck with piles and piles of dead things. Pieces of the past would stack one on top of the other with nowhere to go.
Old stories would be told on repeat.
Old habits unable to be changed.
Regrets and scars and pain would have no way to heal.
Healing is an act of decomposition. It transmutes the past into something manageable, nourishing even, that can be used as healthy soil for the seeds that have yet to be planted. Instead of looking at healing, as something that is done once. A switch flipped on and then off. It might be more useful to look at healing as an essential component of living. A necessary precursory act of growth.
We can put a lot of pressure on ourselves to “complete” the healing process. We want a type of healing that leaves no remnants of what came before. Sometimes we can put enough distance between our present and our past to experience this type of healing, but more often than not the behaviors, and perspectives and circumstances of the past stay with us. They might look different, be softer, in pieces barely recognizable, but they are still there, skeletons of themselves.
Plastic takes 500+ years to decompose. Aluminum cans take a hundred. Orange peels take 6 months and tree leaves take a year. How long something takes to decompose is dependent on its make up. It is dependent on how much the microorganisms understand what to do with it.
Healing is a process. Healing isn’t always a vegetable. Sometimes it’s a car that years later, is undrivable and rusty, parked in the woods, but still has clearly defined edges. Sometimes it’s a plastic bag that never fully leaves you, because you aren’t quite sure how to break down its components. Whatever the case, healing doesn’t have to be an all or nothing process. It can be something that happens over a long period of time. In stages. Imperfectly.
Regardless of how fast or slow or “complete” your healing is, you are still giving to the soil of your life. You are still adding nutrients, nourishment, new habits, new perspective, a new type of kindness.
My fiance’s family has a way of looking at healing that acknowledges the imperfect, yet integral nature of decomposition: The healing you make in your life, however incomplete, makes life a little easier for the next generation. Healing leaves something of us in the soil. It changes the makeup of the earth, so that our children and our grandchildren grow up in a different kind of landscape than us.
In my own healing journey, I find that when things get really stressful or there are big changes in my life, it’s easier to revert back to behaviors of the past. Each time this happens, I come to it in a slightly new way. The healing I have already done has been the foundation for a new type of root system. Growth in how compassionate I am to myself, how I experience my feelings and the tools I have to manage my mental health. Even though my healing isn’t “done” because the past is still coming up in the present, the present looks different and that different present creates a different future.
In other words our healing has the potential to turn once a barren land into a field filled with wildflowers.
Purchase Home: Meditations on living in the present. It’s a collection of prose poetry to help you connect to yourself in this moment. Here. In this moment. Home.