ODDY


April 20th 2006

copyright don oddy

~ grief ~

if yesterday was lost in grief, don't lose today and tomorrow by keeping it in your memory

If yesterday was lost in grief, don't lose today and tomorrow by keeping it in your memory, we need challenge this assertion in my opinion!

We benefit from time passing. We continue to experience this world in all its perfect imperfect. And we experience this world with senses tuned to our history. As we grow and mature our outlook is informed and coloured by events, feelings and thoughts. How we develop our outlook is the flow of all experience and how we judge. As simple as Jung in his capture of how our minds work, we perceive and we judge. Our automatic default is continual perception and continual judgment. it’s a wonder we even know we are doing this. And we are alerted every day to our perception and judgment by an inner voice. That inner voice is our conversation with ourselves. Sometimes we talk to ourselves out loud and most of the time our inner voice is there, the internal conversation. Some say its our conscience talking to us, most of the time its us, chattering away. Its our internal perception and judgment, never turned off, except when we are diverted by our senses and environment to look outward and communicate with our world, people places and things.

And as we develop and grow, we can become adept in our outlook and we get good at certain things. As Aristotle is credited, habit and routine are merely stepping stones to excellence. And with our mind we are quite forgetful how we achieve excellence just by perceiving our environment and judging it. Our internal computer forever switched on, our channels of communication never switched off, just refining to our environment and becoming excellent in our experiences.

And when we experience love, we become excellent, and when we experience our labours, manual and of the mind, we become excellent, we develop our expertise as we go. And we are all gifted in our excellence and all our experiences are similar and at the same time unique and authentic to us. We are Artisans of life.

As Artisans of life, we develop to make excellent use of our surroundings and our opportunities. Aristotle is quite correct, the gift of excellence is from routine and from habit. We get good at being good, or get good at being bad and every element in between. And we relate our experience to our conscience and it talks back to us, it expresses as if sometimes our guardian angel were talking directly to us. Our guardian as good as our experience and most likely striving for more and better experience. Our guide, our guardian angel sitting with us forever, helping us judge this world and our behaviour in it.

Life is life, and as we journey we get good at dealing with all it has to offer. The high of life, love of life and loss of life. We can become excite by the love and the loss. We can become good interpreters and recorders of our feelings for love and loss of love. We are driven by our feelings in all respects when we deal with life for ourselves our family, community and society. We are always driven by our nature and our conscience, and each is persuaded to get good by virtue of our experience.

We see and hear of fellows who have goodness inside them, they are revered for their conscience and contribution, their support and love of everyone. And so we find fellows with great sadness and experience of grief. Great swathes of deep feeling of loss and understanding. And when are gifted with experience of both, our resonance with this more develops deeper and broader connections where we see the breadth and depth of human capacities and emotions.

From early times to mature times our experience can develop our understanding and judgment of our world. We see, we develop our outlook. And sometimes we are caught by the beauty and sometimes the uglier elements of life experience. Our reaction to life is regulated by our sensitivity, our depth and breadth, our freedom to move on and make the present our experience, and let go the past.

Grief comes to us in every feeling we have. From profound love to profound sadness, all rolled together and a process we have for making sense of our lot in this world.

We find ourselves full of wonder in our connections and we feel loss so deeply we can choke and deny its actuality. We can hear ourselves feel and think some losses are unbelievable, the “ I don’t believe it moment” and we recoil from reality and wish our memories and experience restored. Our grief in such moments is expressed mostly without control as we muddle through our losses and make sense of today. When we understand what is happening and when we can perceive the profound changes, get to grips with reality again we can honour our feelings our experience and make moves to move on.

Our memories play like yesterday is today as profound and more striking as shock can restore with benefit of imagination to add to our store. And we can become moribund and stuck as loss make us sad, we cannot shift grief until we make sense of our experience. We need help and support and sharing time to make sense all our experiences or we get caught in great loops. We can become deft and able at grieving on and on or we grieve out our feelings and make room for our days.

Grief is not forgetting, it is honouring the past, and recollecting in stories and sharing with others. We express and let out, we make room for the new, and it takes as long as it takes for each of us to choose. We don’t have set times and we don’t have set patterns, we develop our excellence as we work our habit and routines.

Living computers, diagnostics are there as we use our grieving to make room for our days. Sometimes it takes more time and letting go as we deal with profound changes, sometimes its fleeting and then hits us much later…

We cannot pre judge how we deal with our history, or loves and our sad times, its individual and never the same. And for many in society it’s a madness to expect that we will grieve our experiences as others do and to timetables prescribed.

So when others try to help us to understand grief, they can share similarities and not the actualities of our personal journey to make sense of our state. The best we can hope for is understanding and letting us grief in our own way.

We know our feelings are felt in the same way, how we express them, how long it takes and how we make room for the new of today is our unique journey. Others will hurry us, encourages us and want us to get over it. For our cultures and societies don’t want to dwell in the past, we strive to move on.

Our lessons might be better learned when we relearn how we feel and express our feelings openly so they can pass to our history. Our shame in our sadness is not lost on any single being, yet this vulnerability is being understood far more as we develop our humanity and spiritual selves.

A world forever in turmoil where we are denied any control, pushes great denials and smooths over profound feelings as if they are unnecessary and redundant and worse, signs of weakness not strength.

Our greatest strength is our vulnerability and our openness to change, not strength of denial and not capping emotional selves.

With gentle opinion we will lose to grief some our present days and part of our futures. Yet in grieving our losses we make good our senses and move on more adeptly with greater resonance for our world. Our resilience enhanced as we learn our emotional craft, taking the experience of life and death to account.

Life is for living in every respect, its not ever peaceful and not ever warring, its both. And one without the other is half of ourselves, don’t let others deny you opportunity by bypassing all realities.

If we live a complete life, where we get a balance of all life experience in equal measures, for that is likely, we have equal opportunity to experience love and equal opportunity to experience loss and all shades in between. So if half our lives is full of love and all shades, so then we can expect half of life to involve loss and all shades of grief. Half a life of love and half a life of grief, a balance of the two will give us expertise in both.

And for those lost to notions of evasion, where we deny or ignore our elements of feeling, well, Aristotle would be apt to comment this would be a loss of human excellence rather than an excellent outcome.

Someone once coined the phrase, “you never had it so good”, and the only reason you know this is when you never had it so bad. Best to get over getting over it, best to get on with it, grief and all!

Funny old world eh?