There are a thousand ways to hurt, and a thousand ways to heal.

It hurts to twist your ankle. You can heal it by resting, by going to a physiotherapist or an osteopath, by talking about your ankle and what it is like to be in pain. You can accelerate the healing by making jokes about your ankle and your hurt—that is, jokes about yourself. Recent studies have shown that laughing feels good. (These studies, however, are scientifically suspect as they were performed without a control group.)

The science on this is irrefutable.

It hurts to get a paper cut on your finger. It’s the typical “annoying” hurt. It distracts you from writing and typing and drawing and cooking and playing the piano. Even though it’s a tiny cut, practically invisible, it hurts nevertheless. Also, besides how annoying the cut is, you have to deal with how annoyed you are with yourself for having being inattentive and cutting yourself for no good reason. There’s a word in Yiddish for what you are when you cut your finger for no good reason: a nogoodreasonnik. And there’s another word in Yiddish for people who believe everything they’re told: a shmoo-moo-moo, colloquially referred to as a Moo-nik.

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It hurts to lose a lover. It’s not the same type and level of pain as a paper cut. It takes longer to heal, and the process is more elaborate. While lover-less, you can go to Healing School and learn about Hurting and Healing from friends, from family members, from movies and books and podcasts, and from the sunset. Strangely, the Yiddish word for sunset isn’t sunsetnik. Instead, it’s זונ - ונטערגאַנג (pronounced “zun - untergang”).

It hurts to be told that you have nothing to say, or that you have no voice, or that you really should think twice before opening your mouth again. It heals to speak, shout, sing, howl, and meow. Did you know that in Yiddish a cat is called a meownik?

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It hurts to be in an upside-down world of contagion and confinement. It hurts not to work and not to earn a living. It hurts not to travel, not to go outside, not to visit the street markets, not to rehearse and improvise with cherished colleagues. It hurts to find out that a friend is terribly ill, and to feel that you can’t do anything to help. It hurts not to know how things will turn out. Uncertainty quickly becomes a sort of certainty: Things will never be okay again. This certainty is very, very painful. Although it isn’t easy to achieve, it might heal (a little) to walk from the absoluteness of certainty and back to uncertainty, to its inherent flexibility, its untold possibilities:

In truth, I don’t know how things will turn out.

Everything has a negative and a positive charge. The positive charge of demagoguery, for instance, is our heightened conscience of the value of citizenship, of its rights and duties, and also its joys. The positive charge of confinement is reflection and meditation, among many other valuable actions. The positive charge of a worldwide catastrophe is solidarity, generosity, mutual support, the acknowledgement that we are in this together, we have always been together, and we’ll always be together. I mean, all of us: the parent and the child, the demagogue and the citizen, the nogoodreasonnik and the meownik, the sunrise and the sunset.

Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget: there are a thousand ways to heal.

I often feel like a 300-pound man, ready to burst into tears of joy.

Let me explain.

About five years ago I started taking piano lessons. I’m a highly trained and experienced classical musician, but most of my training was directed toward the cello (plus music history, theory and analysis, ear training, and all the rest). Piano, not so much. Decades ago I had to take “secondary piano” in college, meaning basic training for non-piano majors. Much to my regret, the “secondary” part of it dominated my mind back then, and I paid the price. Until recently, my piano playing was awkward, insufficient, upside-down, banana-peel, and I-want-my-mommy.

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I have a wonderful piano teacher, my friend and brother Alexandre Mion. Besides the helpful lessons Alexandre has given me these past five years, I’ve also embarked on a project of my own: the development of a new piano method, designed to help a pianist—any pianist—connect with the Creative Source and become happy and healthy.

A concert pianist listening to my piano playing might think that I’m a hopeless banana-peel case. “You ain’t no Horowitz,” he or she’ll think. But I’m playing so much better than five years ago that I can barely explain how I feel about it. The 300-pound man used to weight 600 pounds. He’s still overweight and handicapped, but, wow! He’s made so much progress! He feels so much better! He’s, like, 50% unburdened! That’s a lot! Let’s shed tears of joy!

I'm done

Believe it or not, this post isn’t about my piano playing, or my piano method in development. It’s about the archetypal voyage from hurting to healing.

Let’s quote, or misquote, or paraphrase, or invent a saying, and let’s attribute it to Gustave Flaubert. “If you have survived your adolescence, you have a story to tell.” Now let’s imagine a silly-ass Zen teacher re-thinking our dear Flaubert. “If you were born, you’re hurting. Life is the hurt, and life is the healing.”

We’re all trying to figure it out, to feel good or to feel better, to shed if not pounds then resentments. Life is challenging but wonderful, wonderful but challenging. If life weren’t challenging, the following people would be out of their jobs: doctors, osteopaths, priests, psychoanalysts, nurses, preachers, surgeons, firemen, cops, lawyers, judges, prison wardens, and bakers.

The bakers: that was a joke, by the way.

The life voyage from hurting to healing is universal in its need and importance and urgency, but no two people travel in the same way. Do your brother and your sister mirror your journey? Nah. You’ve been diverging for half a century. Your stuff is unique to you, and that’s cause for celebration! Call the bakers and order a cake, gluten-free and sugar-free if you know what’s good for you.

In healing, the symbolic dimension is often stronger than the material dimension. Many years ago, I took some ballroom dance classes. A Canadian woman showed up and participated from time to time. She was a pursed-lips blonde in a man’s button-down white shirt. To my eyes, she seemed to be trying to hold it all in, afraid of looking good, afraid of the swing of life. One day in the middle of class, she unbuttoned her collar. To my eyes, it was a really big deal, as close to a striptease as she could get at that point—or ever. Healing is the healing that’s going to happen, to jerry-rig an expression. “Less fear and more love, to the extent that you can.”

It’s not possible to know what the other person is thinking and feeling, where she comes from, how she got to be the way she is. “I know exactly what you’re going through.” No, you don’t! “What you’re going through resonates with me.” Okay, that’s plausible. I may be totally wrong about that Canadian woman, but the unbuttoning—this was more than 25 years ago—has stayed in my psyche as a meaningful moment, on account of its symbolic power.

Each hurt is individual. And each healing is individual, too. For some people, piano lessons heal. For others, piano lessons hurt. For some, healing comes from doing something; for others, from stopping something. A dear person in my inner circle closed a business he had spent 20 years building up, and struggling with. Difficult as it was, the closing—which was both a letting go and an abandoning—was part of a healing processes.

When you engage in the healing process, you don’t know what the results will be. Closing a business, opening a business? Unbuttoned shirt collar? Sex-change operation? Learning to smile? It isn’t possible to know in advance. This is one of the reasons we often hesitate to get started on the healing journey: fear of the unknown. It takes courage.

The journey is akin to martial-arts training: a battle of wills between the old and the new, the bruise and the Band-Aid, the fear and the hope. As Gustave Flaubert famously didn’t say, “We’re all in it. We might as well go all in.”

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