grief, and

This year, and last year, and the year before that, and that, and that, has been filled with so much loss. National, global, and for many, personal. There has been joy too, and I hope in your life you have had an abundance of it. But today, I am holding the grief.

Grief is a compounding emotion. It builds on itself.  Like water, or tears in a glass. That most recent tear isn’t just the one. It joins all the many tears, it joins all the other water, becomes a flood.

And humans can be all too good at compartmentalizing, rationalizing and minimizing grief. It’s understandable, and it’s useful even. The body is so incredibly adept at surviving. But we compartmentalize our grief and store it in the space between our cells. We minimize our grief, tell ourselves it isn’t right to feel, to focus on the good, to be grateful it isn’t worse.

But grief is part of gratitude.

If we are only grateful, never grieving, then is it possible to even count our blessings? When those blessings have so often come because of someone else’s grief (such is the nature of capitalism) and when those blessings are often so apparent because they are in stark contrast to the grief?

Grief is part of gratitude, but that grief can’t be a performance. There is weight to the grieving. There is responsibility. Grief is part of gratitude because hope is part of grief. To grieve with hope is to dream a better world possible, perhaps not for us, perhaps only for the children of our children. To grieve without hope is to despair, and we don’t have time to despair. Not while the world is burning.

Hope carries a responsibility. If I hope the world will be better for generations to come, then I have to take actions to make the world better. Love is, after all, a verb.

But before the action, the grieving. If we rush over the true weight of what is happening, what has happened, and what is sure to happen in the future, we are only reacting, we are not responding. Responding requires space, because to respond, rather than react, is to look for an opportunity to find a new way. And we are going to need new ways forward if we are going to make it through what is sure to come.

And if we are going to make it through the weeks and months and years to come, we are going to have to yield to the flow of grief, without letting it wash us away from the truth and from each other.

A simple practice to help in holding grief is to lengthen the exhale of the breath. To let it all out, to go completely to empty. This allows the muscle of the breathing diaphragm to dome completely upwards, which then allows the full weight of the heart to be held. Let your heart be heavy. Exhale into that dark space at the bottom of the breath.

To practice this, give yourself a quiet moment. Notice the rhythm of your breath, without trying to force it to change. As you inhale, give yourself the time to breathe all the way in- it takes quite a bit of time. And then, as you exhale, give yourself the time to truly let the breath all the way out. It takes a while. Give yourself that time.

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash