I don’t often experience this in NYC but a man in his thirties asked me how my day was going. I responded in kind and then we sat near each other. There were a few moments of quiet, followed by what seemed at first was light conversation begun by him again. I rarely have time to myself and was torn between engaging and politely telling him I just needed not to converse with anyone. I try and take moments of solitude when I can, even when my car is getting serviced. I noticed he was calm, almost too calm, so that piqued my interest as to where the conversation would go. I let him lead and I simply listened. He began by sharing that he just moved back to NY to be close to his mother and that over a year ago, he retired from the military. He had been in since he was seventeen. He would tell me of the fifty seven countries he visited, warfare school, some of the perks for him of being in service. As he continued the conversation, I pulled back into a more neutral space. I noticed he began to become hypervigilant, his leg began to shake, his speech quickened. Then he started to traverse the darkness. His traumatic brain injury, 8 concussions from blasts, one from jumping onto his friend to protect him from being killed. His protocols range from a number of medications from antidepressants and antianxiety meds, to steroid shots in his skull on an ongoing basis. The frost bite in the bones in his feet has caused drop foot, his shoulder is severely damaged from an explosion. I saw the nightmares in his energy field and asked him if he slept okay. He said no, he suffered with nightmares constantly. I understood why this sweet man walked in to ask how my day was. I understood the need for normalcy, for connection, for knowing that he was okay. There was one part of the conversation where he said to me he wasn’t crazy, as though posing it as a question. I told him that it would be okay if he was. With all that he went through, crazy was just a part of walking through to the other end of healing. He asked me if I noticed if he kept looking over things all the time and that it was a bad habit he developed from his trauma. I told him his hypervigilance had saved his life many times, what a blessing. And that as time passes, he will find other ways to cope as he feels safe. He went from calm to very anxious, even showing me pictures of his wounds and some of his training. I sat there and looked and listened, realizing that he was inviting me to become a part of his story just for that moment, so that perhaps his story could have the opportunity to be witnessed and also shifted from his perspective, even from mine. I asked him to please find support here, a tribe, while he kept saying he thought he would be okay. I said it was okay even if there were times he wasn’t okay.

I notice that during this war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as in all wars, so many are taking sides. The epigenetic threads that we are creating in response to this will be passed down to future generations. Peace will not come if we don’t become a part of everyone’s story. We are too immersed in anger and grief to allow ourselves to be open to perceptions of suffering from people we would never even think of holding space for. Problem is we will never know how anyone has truly suffered until we bear witness to a story we would never even think of listening to.