What has changed for you recently?
What did you lose?
Were you able to experience that loss?
Whenever our life changes, we lose something. And change is a constant.
When we change jobs we can lose the friendships we have built. When we have kids we lose the flexibility and ease of being able to leave the house without planning. When we move house, we lose the convenience of knowing our suburb, our neighbours and our local shop owners.
All of those losses matter.
When I moved to London I was so frustrated I couldn’t find a yoga teacher exactly like the one I had left behind. While I had gained a wealth of art museums and nights at the theatre, and an ability to walk to my central London office in 10 mins, I had lost a lot too. My yoga teacher, hairdresser, easy access to healthy food and conversations with friends who knew me.
Those losses are real.
For a long time I thought the only sadness or grief that mattered was what followed after the death of a loved one. But it isn’t. Sadness lets us know those people, in those places, in those stages of our lives, meant something to us. They mattered.
I was desperately sad while I was in London, so sad that I eventually become numb to it and developed Seasonal Effectiveness Disorder or SAD. They say it’s from a lack of sunlight, but I also think it’s from an inability to process our losses and integrate them into our lives.
Instead of being able to sit with my grief, I tried to avoid it. I tried to pretend I wasn’t sad because I feared that if I accepted my sadness I would have to leave London. But by denying it, it become my constant companion. A grey cloud that hung over my entire time in London.
If I had the safety, support and skill to process that loss, I would have come to see that accepting my sadness didn’t require me to leave London. Instead it would allow me to embrace all London had to offer as itself, not for it’s failure to host my yoga teacher and hairdresser.
That alone is a reason to grieve.
To accept people and places as we find them, not as we wish them to be.
When we take the time to grieve we learn about ourselves. What we like and dislike, the connections we value, what we care about and why. When we can integrate that learning into our being it can organically shape the next phase of our lives.
When we’re unable to accept a loss, we can wallow in it. Become resigned to that loss being our experience of life. That too shapes our future choices, relationships and experiences, but not necessarily in the way we want.
But unless our family, our culture, is comfortable with sadness and grieving, it’s not something to learn at home or in school. It’s something we have to figure out for ourselves.
At the time I had little capacity to recognise sadness or process grief. If I wasn’t crying at something sad in a book or the death of a loved one, the concept of sadness just didn’t register for me.
But eventually I learnt to grieve. To let me body wail at an earth shattering loss. To let the tears flow whenever they asked. To allow myself to feel weighted down by sadness for months without denying it or pushing it away.
But even now, sometimes the small losses, the small sadnesses pass under the radar. It’s not they they aren’t there, but I am not taking the time to notice them.
We experience sadness when we lose something we care about. That can be something tangible, like a lost to stolen bag, or something intangible like a relationship, control, certainty or identity.
And as our lives change everyday, we are constantly experiencing loss, and therefore grief at that loss. Learning how to grieve our loss, no matter how small, is essential to truly experiencing our humanity.
But right now that’s not easy. Many of us live in societies designed to avoid these feelings. Unendingly accessible distractions, convenient solutions, and being valued for our hyper-productivity deliberately keep us from our disappointment, our vulnerability, our sorrow, our boredom, disillusionment and anguish.
Which means grieving and allowing ourselves to experience our losses completely, fully, and integrate it without wallowing in it, is an act of rebellion.
Growing up, I would never have thought that grieving could be an act of defiance and social rebellion. But after mid-life, nothing is as it seemed.
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