Healing.

I am writing this locked out of my room, waiting in the hall for my house owner to bring me my keys; it’s quite cold, I have nowhere to go, and he’ll not be here for another four long hours.

This to say, life isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s pretty average, or even utterly wrong. Life can be a dork, life can hurt; and once we are hurt, we still have to go on. We can then do it two ways, and both are hard: we can stay hurt, or we can try to heal.

Healing is an essential part of life itself.

Without repairing damaged DNA bases, replication would be a failure; without pioneer life growing back after a natural disaster, there would be no forests nor complex ecosystems; and without making efforts to grow back joy after the death of a loved one, we would stay numb and broken until our own death.

So, from a simple DNA strand to complex social structures and whole ecosystems, everything living heals… And we, humans, add another dimension to it, by trying to heal not only ourselves but others, through words, rituals, or substances. But as we grew as a society, we also make new things sick: minds, ways of living, species… And now our planet itself, our only place to live. And sometimes, as we tend to forget that the power we’ve got doesn’t make us gods nor owners of our world, we forget that healing isn’t only about repairing. It’s also about eliminating dangerous elements, cancerous cells, depraved individuals, harmful ideas or microscopic invaders in our body.

So at the end, this question remains: will we heal our world, or will the world heal from us?

This article was written by Isaure Adnot-Corme a Master’s student in the Museum’s “Mechanisms of Life and of the Environment” specialization.