It may sound like a sweeping claim that isn't supported by sufficient empirical methodological observations, but I tend to hold to the view that we live in a rather fractured world. People are fractured in different ways - some physically, others mentally, and yet others emotionally.

Those who're fractured physically rather easily invoke the compassion of bypassers, since the disabilities are observably apparent. Those who're mentally fractured may express different behavioural patterns; some patterns invoke pity whilst others invoke fear. But those who are least tolerated by the world are those who're emotionally fractured. The world doesn't have time to offer any form of compassion, let alone support, to the emotionally fractured. It's often assumed that those who're emotionally fractured are thus because they choose to be so. In actuality, no one chooses to be emotionally fractured anymore than one chooses to be physically disabled.

Healing is sometimes more difficult for the emotionally fractured than for the physically fractured. Because this world thrives on the visible; therefore infrastructures are established for physical wholeness, but not for emotional wholeness. It's too arbitrary for any benchmark to be established for the measurement of emotional wholeness, they say. I'm not sure if such a benchmark is necessary. In the first place, the human emotion defies every logical law of prediction. Thus, to even attempt to establish scientific methodology for the stewardship of human emotions is itself very defiant of the fact of humanity's emotional complexity.

But take the time to open your heart to listen to someone's story today. Don't judge. Just listen and learn, and accompany people in their emotional struggles. And perhaps you'll be able to stand with me and see that my claim (which is empirically unsupported) may actually be true. It's a fractured world, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.

And perhaps the best thing that we can offer to the world is our own journey towards wholeness. Of course, neither of us is actually completely whole. We are in many senses broken people, just like everyone else in the world. But we have stories to tell of how we're on a journey towards wholeness. Not triumphalistic stories of victory, but stories of a real possibility for hope; and together with that, the real acknowledgement that we too are still strugglers and fellow sufferers. So that others will be inspired to walk along with us towards that dream for wholeness.

Such dreams aren't mere wishful desires. They're real, for we know where they come from.