Stop clutching your life and start living it
The way I’ve been avoiding writing about this tells me this is exactly where my blockage is. Isn’t it the rule of the universe that if you want to win something, you stand to lose something ?
Okay, maybe no one taught me this quite that directly, but I feel like this is the fear that bubbles up at the top of my consciousness whenever I’m on the precipice of winning.
If you are anything like who I’ve been up to this point, then you too, have been ruled by fear since the first particle of light first hit your eyes.
And is there, truly, any fear greater than the fear of loss ?
Any fear that compares to the unending abyss that loss is ?
The great power that loss wields against us all is that it wears a different face to meet each one of us. Loss is so thorough that it even wears a different smile to meet us at different moments of our lives. We run into it in new and unfamiliar places and moments that feel like home alike. In that sense, all phases of our lives are equal in the face of loss.
It’s hard for humans to speak or think about loss for long before they instinctively start to feel depressed. It is not a matter of temperament but one of human biological wiring. Likewise, it’s a fact that loss registers in the human brain as pain.
Once you realize that for us as a species, calories were the original currency, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that loss in the pre-agricultural era, meant loss of calories which meant loss of…well, life.
The French said it best, nature is well-made, I suppose.
Point is, with our pre-patriarchal pre-agricultural days long behind us, it seems this visceral repulsion for loss has turned into a leash of sorts.
The kind that keeps you in unsatisfying jobs, dead-ended relationships that demand you compromise your boundaries and sense of self, and friendships that make you want to throttle the person you’re still “friends” with.
That kind of leash.
I mean, I don’t think any kind of leash is fun. One could postulate that the average human experience with leashes is not…an enjoyable one.
But most people you know (let’s not focus on you or me), would choose their leashes time and time again instead of facing their fear of losing that relationship, that certainty, that security, that familiarity even once.
Is this sad ? Yes.
Must it be accepted ? Also, yes.
So you, everybody you know and their grandma, are afraid of losing things you don’t even know you’re afraid to lose. Did I forget to mention that loss’ other great power is that it is usually invisible to us but painfully obvious to everyone else ?
Look at where you’re the most grateful, and that will tell you what you’re most afraid to lose. You know that tight feeling in your chest when you’re being so happy for something ?
That, what-if-something-happens-to-it reaction ? What if it gets taken from me ?
Yeah, that’s our good ol’ loss. Normal biological wiring, remember ?
Don’t beat yourself up for having an innate reaction, and grow your gratitude practice to reduce the effect that reaction has over you.
I should be honest and say that I’ve had the hardest year of my life by every single identifiable and quantifiable variable important to me. I’ve spent a good amount of time with loss this year.
She met me last autumn, coming out of the Mediterranean Sea in a blood-soaked gown and now that I’ve spent a year by her side, maybe it’s the golden light of early autumn, but it’s just now dawning on me that her dress is turning a beautiful shade of baby pink. Almost the same shade of the innocence she took from me a year ago.
She sliced me open like Swiss cheese and took whatever she thought was no longer mine to keep. All I could do was cry and beg and yell and rage until she eventually tired me out. And now when I move around this world, I don’t feel like there are any holes left in me anymore. None left that she didn’t show me. Somewhere between grief and despair, gratitude bloomed.
Truth be told, and though I still need lulling to hear it, everything I lost was no longer mine to hold. When you study philosophy, you quickly learn you have to love your life like you chose it and if you don’t assign meaning to your life, randomness and chaos will.
So when loss comes to you wearing a face only you recognize, sit with it.
It’ll hurt. It’ll hurt so bad it will redefine suffering for you, but then you take your first free breath, and it feels like existence itself was made just for you to feel this catharsis, this relief, this freedom.
And one day, you’re walking down the streets of your favorite city, and you see loss knock on the door of her next patient, and she smiles at you.
She smiles at you and you just know, you’ll be seeing her again but next time you’ll welcome her as a friend.
