Nothing Is Lost, It Only Changes Place

Where do we go when we are broken? It is a question that has circled my head for a long time. I try to understand why I seek that connection with nature. Is it my way of escaping, or my way of returning to the essence of what I am? Perhaps the answer is simple. The truth is that almost always, even when we are not aware of it, it is in those moments that we truly manage to see ourselves. And many of us, without ever planning to, return to whatever lets us reconnect with a more essential part of who we are, that place where the noise softens, where attention stops being fragmented, and where the body can step out, if only for a moment, from the state of alertness in which we so often live. Maybe that is why we seek nature. Because among the silence, the movement of the water, the wind, and the life that goes on without asking anything of us, the weight of the everyday seems to dissolve. The nervous system can stop answering so many things at once, the mind finds a little room, and we become present again. I do not know whether that is returning to what we really are, but perhaps it is remembering that, before all the noise, we are also animals.

A wounded animal does not look for company. It looks for a place to recover, a corner in the shade and beside the water where the body remembers how to mend, how to rebuild, or what we so casually call healing. We have been there too. We have gone out into the forest not to flee from ourselves, but to find ourselves. Out there, among the sound of the wind and the water, pain stops having a speech and goes back to being what it is, a tired animal looking for somewhere to drink. There is something the mountain understood long before we did, that not everything heals in the chaos of daily life. Sometimes you have to grow quiet enough to truly hear yourself.

Healing does not give us back the person we were. That is, perhaps, the first idea we have to let go of. You would like to return to the one you were before life changed your rhythm, before a wind too strong tore off the leaves and left the branches bare under the sun. But that man was precisely the one who did not yet know that some wounds do not come to take something from us, but to teach us a different way of staying on our feet. Healing is not returning. It is learning to recognize ourselves in places where we did not know how to be before.

Perhaps we are born with certain fears that resemble, too closely, those of the animals we were before we had names. One of them is the fear of not measuring up, of not being enough. Another, older and deeper, is the fear of not being loved. These are not flaws of character. They are inheritances. From the moment we are born we depend on others to survive. We learn very early to watch the faces that care for us, to discover what makes them glad, what drives them away, what draws us into their arms. And perhaps that is where that old certainty comes from, the one some of us carry without knowing it, that if I do what they expect of me, they will love me, and if they love me, they will take care of me. Maybe that is where our fears were born, back when to be born different meant being cast out of the group, and no one survived alone in the open. The bird that loses its flock does not only lose company, it loses the map, the warmth, the warning of danger. That is why exclusion hurts in such an ancient place. The body does not always tell the difference between absence and cold.

That is where some of us come from, the ones who learned to reach out first. To write first, to ask first, to seek the encounter before the other had time to wonder whether they even wanted to find us. For years I mistook it for generosity. And sometimes it is. But beneath it a small, stubborn fear can live, the very same one of the child who learned too soon that perhaps you had to do something to deserve being loved. The fear that, if I stop reaching out, no one will come toward me. Like the bird that sings first at dawn, not because it is brave, but because it needs to hear another voice among the trees to know it is not alone. There is a question that is a little embarrassing to say out loud, and I say it anyway, because keeping it quiet does not make it any less true, if I stopped searching, who would stay?

There are things that take a long time to understand when life stops being the one you imagined. It is not only what leaves that hurts. What hurts, above all, is the version of ourselves that lived there, in that life we once managed to imagine and that is no longer going to happen. Two things are lost at the same time, one that can be seen, the absence of the one who goes, and another far more silent, the absence of who we ourselves were going to be in that life. We mourn what is no longer tangible, yes, but we also mourn what we only got as far as imagining. And that second burial has no witnesses. Over the years I have come to understand that not every loss arrives because something went wrong. Sometimes it is only a river that dries up before reaching the sea, and even so the sea keeps its course with the water that river managed to hand it along the way. But not all absences are the same. There are losses in which, like the sea, you keep your course with what you managed to receive. And there are others that never return, the ones you can do nothing with but learn to live alongside. Because there is an absence of life that carries away forever the chance to touch again, to embrace again, to be there again, and then you understand that certain waters never rise again, though the shore keeps waiting for them.

And healing, then, is learning one of the hardest things of all, to give ourselves from within the embrace we waited so long to receive from outside. There are griefs that no one can close for us, because they happen in a room where only we ourselves fit. In the meantime, we learn to pretend. I learned to say I'm fine with my chest full of water, and I think many of us have learned the same. We smile politely while inside the water keeps rising, as if naming the fear could make it grow. But sometimes the opposite happens, and what we do not name finds other ways to say itself.

It stays in the clenched jaw, in the sleep that will not come, in that unexplainable hurry of those of us who do not know how to be still. The body ends up speaking the language the mouth insists on keeping quiet. So if you ever hear me say I'm fine, do not mistake my smile for calm. Sometimes it is barely the last thing still afloat. Getting out of there, for me, began with something simple, learning to separate what I do from what the other does with it. If I act from my values and with good intention, that is where my responsibility ends. The rest, whether it blooms or dries up, whether it is received or lost, is no longer mine to carry.

It is strange how much the weight we carry for others weighs, and how much lighter the day becomes when we finally hand it back. The fear of loss does not disappear from one day to the next. It loosens over the years, when you discover that you do not die of an absence, even though inside it sometimes seems you might. That life goes on even when someone is missing, when something we loved goes away, when we could not hold on to what we wanted most. Fear is not always overcome. Sometimes it is simply crossed through. It is the sign that announces something is about to carry us to a new place. Not the wall, but the door, the one that frightens us precisely because it is change. A change in everything we knew.

That is why you have to turn the page, but first you have to read it well. We cannot ask time to erase what we are not yet willing to look at. Something I have learned to believe, in my own way, is that what we have lived rarely disappears completely. A word, an image, an act, a wound, the pieces of what we were go on speaking in that silent language we all carry inside. And what we refused to hear head-on, the body sometimes repeats to us from behind.

The pieces do not disappear. They change place. And there, for me, lies one of the few honest ways out, if you dare to listen to where the fear comes from, perhaps you will also find where to leave that dark place. No one reaches page twenty of their life if they skipped what happened on page three. So I read it slowly. I underline in green ink what I want to remember. I learn what it has to teach me. And then I turn it. Not to forget what it says, but because I have already learned every word of that story we once were.

Nature taught me that patience. The river does not resent the flood that broke its bank, with that same water it remakes its course, a little more its own. The bird molts its feathers when the old ones no longer let it fly, and it does not stay there weeping over the fallen plumes. There are seeds in the savanna that will not wake until the fire has passed over them, as if certain things in us needed to burn in order, at last, to be born. And the birds that leave with the winter come back with the waters, because leaving, sometimes, is only the way we have of learning the road home.

Maybe that is why I write this. Not to flee from fear, but to look it in the eye and keep walking with it at my side, the way you walk with an old dog that no longer bites but insists on following you. To break is not the end of the story. It is, almost always, the exact place where something begins again.