Loss is always just hiding under the surface, brimming at the edge of our consciousness or hiding at the periphery of our vision, ready to leak out. It’s a fact of everyday life. We face it at every turn.
Loss is married to change.
Whether we leave a job or a school to enter a new one, face the end of a friendship, relocation of a family member, death of a loved one or simply, really, any minute change in circumstance, we can’t escape it’s ubiquity. Because when we expect what we expect, and we get what we expect, we feel safe. And when we are hit with the unexpected, control is gone. And there, staring at you with cruel, beady eyes, is loss.
Sometimes i feel like it permeates the air like a curtain or a fog. It’s palatable. You can taste it as you walk around. It tastes bitter like a grapefruit seed that you’ve bitten into by accident.
I wonder if I’m suffering from some sort of depressive disorder, but most of the time I just think it’s an acridity that we live with because that’s the nature of being alive in an incomplete, imperfect existence. So instead of letting it slide over me, engulf me or worse, shackle down my wrists, I ask God what it is teaching me, what He is doing, and how to overcome.
I’ve recently been struggling with a string of back-to-back losses that make me feel like I am constantly spilling puzzle pieces on the ground, and then picking them up and trying to piece them together. But they keep getting knocked onto the ground. In spite of the halting progress or maybe because of it, the picture is slowly coming together. Through the process, I am learning one very simple eight letter word: patience.
To read the rest of my story, click here.
Really glad that this was my first post. Because this entire blog was birthed out of loss. Leaning into the idea that “there is as much guidance when way closes as when way opens” (Parker J. Palmer).