What is vengeance but the human heart's refusal to let pain pass through it?
The law stands as a dam against the flood, not just to hold back those who would take, but to restrain those who have been taken from. For when they strike your bloodline, your soul screams for compensation, their one life for your loved one's breath. But the equation is never that simple.
You take two for their one. They return with four. You answer with eight. The multiplication of suffering spreads like wildfire through generations, burning down houses that never even saw the original spark. Grandsons inherit blades meant for their grandfathers. Mothers bury children over feuds that started before those children could even speak their own names.
But is revenge justified? The question cuts deep because the wound is real. When they violate what's sacred to you, your family, your honor, your livelihood, something primal awakens. That rage isn't manufactured; it's the most honest thing you might ever feel. It's love turned inside out, bleeding.
Yet anger is the blindfold we tie around our own eyes. In that darkness, we can't see that the person we're hunting might have a mother too. We can't see that our vengeance might orphan someone innocent. We can't see that the very thing we're trying to heal, our pain, only deepens with each act of retaliation.
Honor demands satisfaction, that letting wrongs go unanswered is death by a thousand cuts. But perhaps true strength isn't in the swift strike, perhaps it's in the discipline to break cycles instead of continuing them. Perhaps the truest revenge against those who tried to destroy you is to refuse to become the destroyer yourself.
The dead don't get satisfaction from your violence. Only the living do. And sometimes, the person who needs to live the most is you.
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But then again... who am I to tell you how to live? I don't even live up to what I speak, not in the past, not in the present, and as much as I dread to say it... not in the future.
I am but a flawed being, who too has been hurt, and has tried to fill a hole... despite knowing violence cannot heal me, I give it more room to grow. I have come to believe it is my nature. Maybe it is yours too.
Perhaps we are all just wounded creatures, preaching water while we drink wine, speaking of peace while our hands still remember the weight of what we've used to hurt others. The wisdom sounds beautiful when it leaves our lips, but when the moment comes, when someone takes what's ours, when they spit on our name, when they make us feel small, we become who we've always been underneath the pretty words.
Maybe that's the most honest thing we can say: that we know better, and still we choose worse. That we understand the cycle, and still we spin the wheel. That we see the cliff, and still we run toward it, because the fall feels more familiar than standing still.
We are philosophers in comfort and animals in pain. And perhaps acknowledging this contradiction isn't defeat perhaps it's the only real place wisdom can begin.