Unfinished Business

In psychology, unfinished business refers to emotions and memories surrounding past experiences that one has avoided or repressed. Life is very generous with painful experiences like the loss of a beloved one or the break-up of a genuine relationship. Poet Khalil Gibran sang of pain as “the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Understand your pain, accept it. That’s the secret of dealing successfully with pain. Pain is a season of the heart even like “the seasons that pass over your fields.”

But we often choose to avoid or repress pain. When we do that, the pain goes into some dark chamber of our consciousness and remains there like a smouldering cinder beneath the mounting ashes. Some of us may seek to escape the pain by consuming intoxicants or engaging in binge eating or compulsive shopping. Unfinished business is dangerous. It burns within. It can burn us out by filling our souls with sadness, fear, anxiety, mistrust, hate and whole lot of negative emotions.

Confront your pain. Understand it. Change the situations that cause the pain if you can change them. Change your attitude towards the situations if that is possible. What cannot be changed has to be accepted. Break the shell that encloses your understanding.

Pain can create beautiful things like soul-stirring music, paintings, literature, and so on. Transmute your pain into beauty. Sing like Shelley, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Or better still, like Khalil Gibran, “keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life” and then “your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.”

Some pains are so traumatic that it takes time to deal with them. But deal with them, we must. Otherwise they will haunt us forever as our unfinished business.

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