The Experience

A wise man once said, "the remedy is the experience." For the longest time I wondered what that really meant. I think that there could be a double meaning in the sense that he was saying that going through the experience of something IS the remedy for whatever needs healing. The other possible meaning that I got from this is that the whole process of healing is THE experience. The experience, meaning that going through that process is "talk of the town" material for someone's life.

I still don't know what he meant when he said that, but maybe looking at the context of this quote might help. His best friend, at the time, was going through cancer treatment. Everyone knows that going through all the radiation and all the different types of chemotherapy can be a pain. However, this cancer victim met someone that told him basically to look at things differently. What was meant by differently was that instead of seeing the cancer treatments as unfortunate and bad, he should see it as a blessing because not everyone gets to go through this process. So, in a sense, all the things he has to do to treat his cancer is special because he gets to see what it's like, while not very many other people do.

It probably takes a whole lot of strength to be able to see things that way: to not worry your life away in such hard times. But such a simple concept probably changed my life even though I had nothing to do with it. Throughout the past several years, this is what I've lived by. And sometimes I'll forget what it means or refuse to see things that way, like recently, but it doesn't take away from the point that it is something I encourage onto other people as well.

There is and always will be a positive end of the spectrum, you just have to find it; and that, to me, is the experience - the remedy. So coming back to what I said earlier about saying that I'm not sure what the person really meant about how the remedy is the experience, to me, it is both.

A lot of times, going through something crappy is exactly what we need in order to mend a certain part of our lives. And then at the same time, the whole process of going through that healing will feel like none other when all is said and done.

It's all about the wordplay.