Healing Takes Time
Quite possibly the biggest struggle we twenty-first century westerners have with healing is that it’s not instantaneous. In our “gotta have it now” culture, we struggle with any process that cannot be speeded up. We have instant rice, potatoes, and coffee. In Vegas you can have an instant wedding. Depending on where you live, Amazon may be able to deliver your package within an hour. We are encouraged to pre-order, to use the app so we spend less time in line, to participate in grind culture by going and moving and not stopping to make things happen faster and sooner. Delayed gratification is not valued in our society. Waiting has gotten harder. We want it our way, now.
However, some processes cannot be speeded up. Some actions take just as much time as they did before the Industrial Revolution. One such affair is healing. Even while there are medicines and therapies that aid the healing process, and may shorten it, healing still takes time, and always will. Your body cannot heal itself instantaneously. You cannot mentally “get over” a traumatic event at the snap of your fingers. It still takes time to travel from point A to point B, whether you’re flying, driving, or healing. There will be moments in time you can pinpoint: here’s where I decided to get help, here’s an occurrence that felt like healing, here’s where I started taking antibiotics. Yet even then, you still need time to process those pinpoints, your body needs time to absorb the antibiotics into your bloodstream.
Modern medicine is not magic. It cannot conjure healing out of thin air. Healing takes time. You have to rehabilitate your knee over a series of months. When you meet a physical therapist, it’s a minimum two-month relationship, plus homework. When you take antibiotics, it’s a minimum of a five-day course. When you meet with a counselor, you don’t often make progress until at least a couple months in, because it takes that long just for you to lay the groundwork. Rome wasn’t built in a day and you cannot heal in a day. You can make progress. With an open ear, you can hear something differently for the first time. You can be kind to your body for a day, drink enough water, get enough rest. Turning that one day into a series of days is what will bring about healing. It takes time. It takes work. Be patient. Be gentle with your self. Do the big and little things, the external and the internal activities, to bring about your wellness, because they add up.