We Love The Scar, But Ignore The Blade.

 

Tonight, I kept thinking of a child and a stove.

It is a small, almost ordinary image: a child returns to its flame, touches it, screams in pain, and learns resilience to touch it again. With greater speed each time.

Two adults are watching this. After a while, the adults begin to admire her. They say she is strong from within. They say she is brave to go back and touch it. They say there is something gritty in the way she has learned not to cry for long. Yet, all that while, the stove remains where it is, firing on with its authority, as if it had been placed there by no one. The two adults ignore the stove.

I have begun to suspect that this is how we speak about ‘Inspiration’.

For so long, we have loved stories in which a person is first wounded by the world and then becomes admirable. We are moved by the one who survives suffering and returns smiling, by the one who escapes hunger and reaches richness, by the one who crosses ruin and arrives to greatness. These stories do move me. I do not dislike their beauty.

But I have also started to feel uneasy about what sits beneath that beauty. At some point, we stopped merely honouring resilience and began arranging the room around it. We began speaking as though suffering is not an error, but a necessary corridor through which inspiration must pass.

And I cannot believe that approach anymore. It seems to me that real inspiration is elsewhere. 

I realize true inspiration is not just in teaching oneself to endure the unbearable, but in pausing before it and asking: why was this made unbearable at all? Who left it this way? Who benefits from calling endurance noble when repair would actually be possible? Why are those two observing adults not turning off the stove?

I also think of those who did not simply admire suffering but interrogated its core cause. There is something far more radical in a person who looks at illness, poverty, violence, deprivation, not as fate, not as character-building effort, but as a flaw in the everyday human choices. 

'To reduce suffering before it ripens into life-long tragedy': that feels to me like a truer form of inspiration, may be even love. It is less theatrical for the world, perhaps. Less easy to praise in speeches. But such inspiration is more moral.

The strange thing is that we often wait until damage has already entered the body, the mind, the family, the neighborhood. Then we rush in with remedies and call ourselves compassionate, may be inclusive too. We offer treatment after trauma, recognition after neglect, opportunity after long humiliation. These acts matter. They are not empty. But they also carry a faint sadness, as if we have grown accustomed to meeting people only after the flood has reached their throat.

Why do we remain downstream for so long? Why does prevention seem less stirring to us than survival?

Perhaps because prevention does not flatter us in the same way. There is no dramatic before-and-after, no heroic scar to point to, no visible proof that pain has refined the soul. Prevention is almost impolite. It removes the spectacle. It suggests that many of the burdens we praise people for carrying, should never have been loaded onto them at all. And maybe that is what disturbs us most: the possibility that human beings are not failing to be stronger, but are being asked to bear too much.

Now, I do not want to stop admiring resilience. That would be cruel. There is grace in the people who continue despite everything. But I no longer want to build a moral world that depends on their continued endurance for its most inspiring stories. I no longer want to look at a wound and praise the healing so intensely that I forget to ask what caused the wound.

The world needs to remember this. When a weight is lifted from someone, their strength does not disappear. On the contrary, it becomes visible in a new way, less as strain, more as possibility.

A child relieved of fear may become curious. A mother relieved of impossible choices may become generous in new ways. A community relieved of constant injury may finally reveal its intelligence, its humour, its hidden music.

So perhaps inspiration is not the art of loving the scar. Perhaps it is the quieter act of reaching toward the blade and ensuring it no longer cuts anyone. And so, the most honest question I live with tonight is not how resiliently the child touched the flame, but why the two adults never turned the stove off.