After “Call Your Spirit Back” was published,
one thing
truly surprised me.
That article
began to be shared widely.
The number of readers kept rising.
I watched the numbers climb.
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
Then,
far beyond the readership of anything,
Why this article, of all things?
Later,
I slowly began to understand:
People were not really reading about
the hotel fire.
Nor about David, the Navajo.
They were reading about themselves.
Because in every person’s life,
there is some kind of their own fire.
For some, the fire is marriage.
For some, the fire is illness.
For some, the fire is betrayal.
For some, the fire has no name.
But the feeling
is very similar.
That feeling of:
Why can’t I let go?
Why am I still in pain?
Why has it been so long,
yet I am still trapped there?
And I did not give readers a simple answer.
I did not tell them:
“You should forgive.”
I even honestly wrote:
“I cannot do this.”
“I am only human.”
Perhaps that is exactly why
readers kept reading.
Because they sensed:
this is not preaching.
This is a person
who truly walked out of the fire, step by step.
I did not deliberately teach forgiveness.
I simply placed David’s story,
Caroline Myss’s talk,
and my own struggles along the way
honestly on the page.
Then,
I let them speak for themselves.
Only later did I slowly understand:
what truly moves people
is often not the answer.
It is the truth.
There was something else
I only saw later.
In that article,
there were actually two worlds.
One was science.
One was spirituality.
Many years ago,
I once stood in a lab at MIT,
looking through an electron microscope,
studying DNA replication.
And many years later,
I found myself late at night,
reading the Bible,
and crying over the story of a Navajo man.
These two identities
seemed so far apart.
Yet they truly existed
in the same life.
I am not a blindly superstitious person.
Nor am I a coldly rational person.
I have simply been searching for:
what is life, really?
And when I walked all the way to this point,
I suddenly realized:
some answers
are not found under a microscope.
Nor are they found in anyone’s doctrines.
They only appear
when a person is willing to face their own life honestly.
Later, I finally understood:
some articles are read by so many people
not because they are beautifully written.
But because
they were first
truly lived by one person.
I did not write to please readers.
I wrote to survive.
To call my own spirit back.
And perhaps that is why
those walking in the same darkness
could recognize each other
in the words.
Now,
I am still slowly digesting all of this.
I am not in a hurry to have all the answers.
Because what truly matters
is no longer:
why so many people read this article.
It is this —
everyone has their own fire.
And everyone
has the possibility of finding themselves again.
And when a person finds themselves again,
they may also discover:
deepest inside all the wounds,
there is still one thing
that never left.
That is love.
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