Intertribal Life Newspaper -

The Second Arrow

By Crying Wind

My neighbor Charlie enjoys archery and has a target set up in his back yard. Sometimes I watch him shooting arrows at balloons or apples or even pumpkins. He's a very good archer but sometimes even Charlie misses the target and an arrow will end up sticking in the side of his garage.

One day when I was standing behind him watching him shoot at empty cans on a bench, the first arrow went straight through a can but the second arrow glanced off the edge of the bench, flew up into the air and came down and stuck into the ground a few feet away. Charlie was upset and apologized.

"You almost got wounded by the second arrow," he said.

I hadn't been scared at all because I'd seen the arrow coming and knew I wasn't in danger, but Charlie's words hit me right in the heart.

"Wounded by the second arrow," was the perfect description of a very bad habit I had. I'd been guilty of firing the second arrow at too many people for too long.

When people hurt me, the first thing I did was tell someone about it. If a clerk in a store was rude to me, I'd call my friend Denise and tell her all about it and because she was my friend, she'd sympathize and agree with me that the clerk was an awful person.

If someone criticized me and hurt my feelings, I'd tell Denise I was hurt and we'd agree people just didn't appreciate us. We'd say that after we were dead and gone people would realize all we'd done for them, and it would be too late.

I might feel as if I'd been wounded, wrongly wounded at times by people, but when I dumped my feelings on Denise, I was shooting a second arrow into my friend and upsetting her and spoiling her day.

Because she cared about me, if I was hurting, she would share my pain.

I would relive and rerun the tapes in my head over and over, why be hurt and upset once if you could relive it 50 times in your head? If I was wounded, I would relive and repeat my stories of being "wronged" until I had so many arrows sticking out of my chest I looked like a porcupine with hundreds of quills sticking out of me.

I decided in the future when I was hurt, I would not keep pointing at the invisible arrow sticking out of my chest and complaining about it, and I would not shoot any arrows into anyone else by repeating stories of how I'd been hurt.

I couldn't believe how much I complained about trivial things every day. I got cut off in traffic, someone honked at me, the checker at the store charged me for six tomatoes when I only bought four. Were any of these things important? Did they matter? None of these things deserved one minute of my time, they certainly didn't deserve repeating them to my friends and expecting sympathy so I could feel justified in feeling hurt or upset.

It was an amazing revelation to me that I had been so self-righteous and toxic.

I asked Charlie if he had any damaged or broken arrows I could have, and he gave me an arrow that had snapped in half when it had hit a tree.

I took the broken arrow and buried it in my flower garden with a note I'd written to myself that said I was not going to wound myself or anyone else with a "second" arrow.

It took a while to learn to keep my mouth shut and to learn that I didn't need to express an opinion about everything and everyone. What other people did or didn't do was none of my business, and what I did or didn't do was none of their business.

Life suddenly became so much simpler. Get over it; let it go, forget it.

If something happens that makes me feel like I've been shot with an arrow, I mentally pull the arrow out of my chest, break it in half, throw it away and forget it. I don't tell anyone if I've had a bad day and by not re-living it by re-telling it, my troubles fade away quickly and disappear.

That second arrow misses the target.

Crying Wind is the author of Crying Wind and My Searching Heart, When the Stars Danced, and Thunder in Our Hearts, Lightning in Our Veins. All her books are available from Indian Life.