The Gifts of Grief

We often assume grief is reserved exclusively for “big” losses, yet it is intertwined with the very essence of our humanity. Every action, every breath, every project, every relationship, every season has a beginning and an ending: a birth and a death.⁣
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And each death brings with it a potential initiation.⁣
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Reality reconfigures with death. The familiar becomes strange, foreign, and unknown. Our relationship to life transforms. We are different, and in the shock of the moment, we are not yet sure how.⁣
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In the wake of loss, we realise that what we thought was solid ground beneath our feet has always been the shifting sand of impermanence.⁣
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It’s understandable why many are terrified of sincerely opening themselves to love, for there is no true love without vulnerability and courage. Love, to the ego, is risky business since the potential for loss is inextricably tied to it. They sit side by side and are proportional to one another: the deeper the love, the deeper the potential for pain. Grief, after all, is one of the many manifestations of love.⁣
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And yet, cheating ourselves from sincere love is just another way of suffering. We think we avoid pain by protecting ourselves, without realising that protection brings its own type of agony.⁣
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We often forget that to love is not a gift to another but a gift to ourselves. The love we allow ourselves to experience is all ours, for that which we love becomes part of who we are: we are forever altered (expanded, revealed, challenged, dissolved, polished, renewed, softened, liberated) through it. ⁣
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We think we can control the pain of grief. We kid ourselves into thinking we can schedule and sterilise the process by ticking a checklist into it being done and complete. Yet, from my experience, it is not “us” that have grief, but rather it is grief that has us.⁣
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Grief decides its own rhythm and choreography. The best we can do is surrender and bravely give ourselves to its waves.