Making Space for Solace
Some time after the Covid pandemic, I wrote about the world’s need to heal itself.
And I raised a question:
Who will heal the healers?
Returning to that thought now, from another angle, it seems that what the world is searching for today is not only healing, but solace, a way to endure uncertainty without being consumed by it.
Yet many of those once able to offer solace, caregivers, institutions, communities, even belief systems, appear to have reached the limits of their capacity. The collective itself feels tired, as if exhaustion has become a shared condition.
The image accompanying this text depicts an artist’s impression of a possible human sacrifice ritual in Neolithic Sweden. To modern eyes, such rituals appear brutal and incomprehensible. But beneath them may have existed something profoundly human: the need to give form to chaos.
Perhaps rituals of sacrifice were not only attempts to please the gods, but also attempts to offer them solace.
A symbolic offering not made against fear, disorder, drought, illness, death, or the unbearable awareness that much of existence lies beyond our control, but as a response to them.
In that sense, sacrifice can be understood psychologically as the surrender of something within ourselves in order to restore balance between the inner and outer world.
Today, we no longer place bodies on stone altars or in the bogs.
But the deeper questions may still remain.
What we once called sacrifice may have been, in part, an attempt to create solace, to restore a sense of order where the world felt overwhelming, indifferent, or unpredictable. A way of giving form to fear so that it could be lived with.
What part of my ego must be surrendered so that solace can re-enter the space between myself and the world?
What must be released, certainty, control, the need to dominate, so that something quieter and more bearable can emerge in its place?
And perhaps that is where healing begins: making space for solace to return.
(image by Gunnar Creutz, Falbygden Museum)
