Famous French psychologist Jacques Salomé talks about how the little things of everyday life help us cope with pain, overcome fear and continue to live no matter what.
My heart burns with anger in the face of a new barbaric act of terror that has plunged the entire country into darkness and caused so much pain to those who have lost their loved ones. I am writing these lines to support, encourage, protect at least a little.
It seems that we are now forced to live between habitual, visible violence and hidden violence. The first takes the life of one person, then thousands of people, causes disgust and anger, clouds and fills our minds with dreary horror. Hidden violence humiliates and debilitates, takes away dreams, tests hope for strength. Both push us into a future where there is no life and leave us no choice.
Unless we make a choice in favor of life — to maintain the source of vitality in ourselves and in everything that surrounds us. Continue sowing, planting, watering and caring for the small garden entrusted to us. See to it that mutually enriching connections with other people are not cut off — relationships that feed us, allow us to open up, grow and develop our potential. Respect each other and take care of the precious life given to us in temporary storage.
- Man as a lie detector
The goal is higher and greater than the violence that invades our lives and tries to destroy us — to protect this life and share it with those who walk beside us. To take root in the present in order to stand, to find a balance in order to continue to nourish everything around with the energy of love. The future has become synonymous with disaster for many. Indeed, what can one hope for when the unthinkable turns into a vile murder in broad daylight and cruel barbarism closes the horizon. There is no hope left when we feel with our skin a frenzied desire to destroy, we see the technical skill and dexterity that they show to take life.
After the perfidious, country-shocking January 7 attack against Charlie Hebdo, my house in quiet Provence, miraculously still an island of safety, kept ringing. First, my children — the youngest daughter, a forty-year-old adult woman, sobbed into the phone, shocked by the intrusion of senseless horror, feeling that her faith in the world was shaken. My other children—some in France, some in the US—reported how they watched helplessly at what most Parisians didn’t believe at first, and what turned out to be a monstrous nightmare of reality.
Then there was a call from my colleague and friend, a female psychotherapist who needed to open the office at 9 am as usual, but she could not bring herself to do it. She called to hear from me at least one word that would help her overcome the impotence that gripped her, the bitter feeling of the meaninglessness of her work — to listen, encourage, guide those who are experiencing difficulties in their personal and family life. How to find the right words for clients when the mind rebels against the absurdity of what happened the day before? When your heart breaks at the thought that her two daughters were on that very street just three weeks ago — they went to visit a friend? She told me in a broken voice that she was haunted by this picture of her daughters being wounded or taken hostage in that building.
Neighbors and complete strangers called — they wanted to know how I survived this terrorist attack, how it affected my vision of the world. Perhaps my beautiful-hearted calls for love, mutual understanding, respect and responsibility have now changed? They began to doubt them and subconsciously wanted me to doubt too …
And I realized that morning that you need to make an effort to solve the accumulated small things, this will help you get together, come to your senses. I felt that I had to ventilate my life, fill it with fresh air, breathe order into my environment in order to get rid of chaos.
It turned out that simple actions — watering the jasmine, which I love, but often forget to water, sort out the papers on the table and throw out unnecessary ones — sometimes work surprisingly well. I was aware that I was clinging to all these little things in order to reconnect with reality, to make it manageable and predictable again, in order to fight the waves of anger and wild rage, violence that rose in me. Yes, and violence too! Crazy, scattered, all-pervasive images of rage flashed before my mind’s eye, which threatened to flood everything!
My answer to all this is that I have no doubts about life, I believe in it and I am going to continue to live. Sometimes I am seized by doubts about the surrounding reality, but I made a promise to myself to protect the life that lives in me and that surrounds me. In this way, I will be better able to protect those who need my help. I see my task in maintaining a peaceful life with all my might — establishing a dialogue, communication between people, so that each of us has the opportunity to live in accordance with our ideal … in a country where terror has also settled from now on.