Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that even painful experiences can hold a sense of nostalgia or value.
Sebastian Junger's quote reflects on the complex emotions associated with trauma and nostalgia. It implies that the experiences we endure during challenging times, such as war, leave lasting impacts, and that the memories tied to these experiences, no matter how painful, can evoke a longing for the intensity and camaraderie of those moments, despite the suffering they may have caused.
In practice
This quote can be used to spark discussions on the psychological effects of war during a veterans' gathering.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one anotherβs lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
The cause doesn't have to be righteous and battle doesn't have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.
When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.
In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence , an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?
I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They're the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They're taking most of the risks. They're absorbing most of the casualties. And they're the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world.
A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins justice ends?
Faith must be tested, because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict.
As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.
Look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/.
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
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