Prelude
There are songs we listen to, and there are songs that seem to listen back, and I had one of those moments recently with Van Morrison’s The Healing Game, a song I have known for some time but had somehow never really stopped to listen to in quite this way, perhaps because I was not looking for anything when it came on and certainly was not thinking about healing, but something in the warmth of the music, in its almost effortless rhythm and in the way the voices seem to gather around the song rather than simply sing it, made me want to listen to the song again, perhaps this time, a little more deeply.
And then I heard those words again, almost like a refrain that had been waiting for me to hear them differently:
Sing it out loud.
Sing it in your name.
Sing it like you’re proud.
Sing the healing game.
I kept returning to them, especially to that word sing, because we tend to speak about healing in such different language, as something quiet and private that happens somewhere inside us, something that time is expected to take care of while we continue with the ordinary business of living, and yet here was an invitation to sing it, as though healing were not simply something that happens to us but something we have to participate in, something that needs a voice.
There are things we spend years keeping quiet, sometimes because they hurt too much to speak about, sometimes because we are ashamed of them, and sometimes because we have lived with them for so long that we no longer know how to explain where the hurt begins and where we end. We become very good at saying that we are fine, because “I am fine” is such a useful sentence when we do not want to invite further questions, and slowly we learn to carry grief without mentioning it, disappointment into new relationships and memories into places where nobody else knows they exist.
Perhaps saying something out loud does not make it disappear, but perhaps it gives it a shape, and once something has a shape we can begin to see it differently, because what has lived inside us without language can sometimes become less frightening when we are finally able to look at it.
Not every wound needs an audience, of course, and there are things that belong to the quietest rooms of our lives, but there are also things that become heavier simply because we have carried them alone for too long, and perhaps there comes a time when silence, which may once have protected us, begins to imprison us instead.
Then comes the line that caught me even more:
Sing it in your name.
A name is never merely a name, carrying the family we were born into, the place from which we came, the stories that existed before us and the expectations that can gather around us long before we are old enough to decide whether we want them. Yet somewhere along the way, each of us has to discover what it means to live in our own name, to recognise the difference between the story we have inherited and the story we are actually becoming.
Perhaps healing has something to do with that discovery, not with denying what happened but with refusing to allow what happened to become the only story we can tell about ourselves, because a wound can be part of a story without becoming the whole story, just as a difficult year can change the direction of a life without being allowed to define everything that follows.
And then comes the line I find most difficult, and perhaps for that reason the one I return to most often:
Sing it like you’re proud.
Proud of what, when there are things we have lived through that we would never have chosen, mistakes we would undo if we could, people we would rather not have lost and moments when we were not the people we wanted to be?
Perhaps the pride is not in what happened.
Perhaps it is in the fact that what happened did not finish us.
There is a kind of courage in continuing that rarely looks like courage while we are doing it, because most of the time it is made up of ordinary things: getting out of bed, going to work, making breakfast, answering the phone, taking a journey, sitting at a table again after a difficult season, making plans when we are still uncertain about tomorrow, and one day discovering that we have laughed at something without having to remind ourselves that we are allowed to laugh again.
Perhaps healing lives there, not in a great moment of release but in the quiet refusal to allow one painful chapter to become the entire book.
We often imagine healing as an ending, as though there will eventually come a morning when the wound has closed, the memory no longer hurts, forgiveness is complete and we can finally put the past down and walk away from it, but perhaps healing is less obedient than that, because we heal and then something reminds us, we forgive and discover there is still some anger left, we let go and find ourselves holding on again.
For a long time, I thought that meant we had failed to heal, but perhaps healing was never meant to be a straight line. Perhaps it is more like walking a road we have never walked before, sometimes knowing where we are going and sometimes simply putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes moving quickly and sometimes stopping because there are journeys that cannot be hurried simply because we are impatient to reach the end.
And perhaps we are not meant to walk them alone, because there are people who walk beside us for a while, people who carry something when our hands are full, people who sit with us when we cannot move, and people whose quiet presence reminds us that we do not have to explain everything in order to be accompanied.
Perhaps recovery, then, is not about returning to the person we were before something happened, because that person knew less about life and had not yet learned what certain losses could do to a person; perhaps it is about becoming the person we can still be after what happened, carrying the knowledge without allowing it to become a prison.
There will always be things we carry, some of which will become lighter and some of which will change shape, some that we will eventually release and some that we will carry for the rest of our lives, and perhaps healing is learning the difference, learning what deserves to remain, what deserves to be released and what needs to be carried differently.
Maybe that is what Van Morrison means when he asks us to sing the healing game, not that healing is a game to be won or that pain should ever be treated lightly, but that there is something active in it, something we have to enter rather than simply wait for, because none of us can choose everything that happens to us, but perhaps we can, over time, choose what we do with what happens.
And perhaps that is why we sing.
We sing because the story is not finished, because there are still people to meet, roads to travel, tables to sit around, mornings to wake up to and things we have not yet seen, and because being wounded does not mean that we have to remain wounded forever, even if the scar remains.
Perhaps healing does not mean becoming untouched.
Perhaps it means becoming able to touch life again.
To trust again. To laugh again. To hope again.
And perhaps that is where the journey begins, not with certainty or answers, but with the willingness to take another step, because before we can walk towards recovery, we need somewhere to walk towards.
Perhaps we need hope.
Sam Khumanthem writes about home, identity, and the quiet complexities of life in Manipur. His work reflects a deep connection to place, shaped by both love and uncertainty.
