W = Wrestle

Wrestling isn’t just an amusement or athletic event.  Wrestling is something that goes on daily within everyone alive.  You wrestle with your anger, your frustration, your choices to be made, your innermost self and sense of values.

Some get so exhausted from wrestling that they try to numb out or find an escape.  They can hide behind numerous tasks to be done, behind a shield they fear to let down so that others will see them as they are, behind anger.  And if they choose to acknowledge this wrestling match going on inside, they usually must bear it alone and do the best they can with what they know and have learned.  Unfortunately, it is a one on one battle that is won or lost in the mind and heart.

The wrestling match can become one over good vs evil and the individual’s role in advancing or stopping one or the other.  It can be a project that needs to be accomplished with unfamiliar territory looming ahead and a lack of faith in oneself to be able to do it.  Then it is a matter of does one forge ahead because effort is worth something in itself or cower at the enormity of said project and all it entails.

The wrestling match can be over truths, opinions on truths, perceptions of truths.  Chasms can occur in relationships, even in careers as differences arise to be wrestled with.

However, isn’t the most devastating and yet monumental wrestling match the one that has to do with being true to oneself?  Once you cross the line and betray your own beliefs, tenets, very essence that makes you you, the ensuing wrestling match can make or break you.  And worse, if you care about others and their feelings and opinions, the match certainly has no guaranteed outcome.

By realizing each person is engaged in their own wrestling match, our words should reflect our empathy, not disdain and disregard.  Who knows?  Maybe aiding someone in their inner wrestling match will help us resolve our own.  I’s definitely something worth considering, isn’t it?