Breaching an emotional wall

   

Subject: Breaching an emotional wall.

My alarm clock brings me back down to earth at 5am as the BBC World Service kicks in to tell me what has been happening in the world whilst I lay asleep.
The time zones across the globe reflect the ebb and flow of our lives where, for most, darkness switches us off and daybreak switches us on each pretty much in ignorance of the conditions on the ground, each so different depending where you are.
This morning I woke to the sound of a doctor saying the words, "your so beautiful". The simplicity of the emotion was perfectly captured by the sound of him saying and repeating it as his guard came down and the compassionate human within him was overcome with love.

It was Aleppo that scene of carnage where man sees fit to pump high explosive shells and bombs into civilian occupied housing on the assumption that this is justified by being in a state of war. A rather one sided war particularly in so far as the civilians are concerned and even more so for the children living in the area.

The doctor was English, he had volunteered to help in the hospitals out there and one day had come to the assistance of a tiny little child who's leg had been mutilated by shrapnel, the same shrapnel which had taken the lives of both her parents.
The doctor described the primitive conditions, and that after 7 hours of intensive operation they had repaired her leg but with no post operative equipment her chances were still very slim. We move forward half a year and he discovers her in a Turkish hospital still recovering but alive. "Your so beautiful" was all he could say as he was reunited with the outcome of his handiwork he was overcome and immeasurably rewarded as she lay alive, starting a new phase of what will be her life.
Emotion is always near the surface of our carefully contrived exterior. We reveal with it that, deep down, we are so much more than our outward appearance. The norms of 'culture' forms a calluses around our natural propensity, be it love or hate, we sometimes contrive to be who we are not, in an effort to fit in.
The sound of the doctors voice so full of love and emotional happiness was like an over spill in a dam of water releasing the pressure, it came from what we euphemistically call the heart, that well of symbiotic feeling we have towards others if and when an occasion allows the wall to be breached.