You have to see where you have been. Or so they say. I believe it’s true.
As author Jerry White said: everyone has a date with disaster. Sooner or later, no matter how good or bad a person, everyone slams directly into uncomfortable, life altering emotions or events. And then, for a time, perhaps forever, life becomes divided into before and after. Before this happened, all of this. After, all of that.
Yet, I firmly believe we can do our best to choose happiness, both before and after. Everything broken needs time to heal and time to change into something new, and that something can be better than before. It may not be stronger, but they say broken and mended bones are actually stronger. So why not broken hearts or altered dreams? It’s a slow, winding process, but one that can happen.
Suffering is a natural component to loss, and loss is one of every person’s dates with destiny. Yet, why do we suffer? Often because we are attached to outcomes, to things, to the way we see life unfolding. Whether that is good for us or otherwise, we want what we want and we suffer for not. getting. it — in all senses of the phrase. But why suffer? When we didn’t get something, our attachment to it becomes much greater, much of the time. Yet it is not really the item or event for which we suffer, but the loss. If we can view our losses as winning another opportunity, we can begin to handle grief with grace.
I am, as it happens, not well equipped for these things, in practice. For a fair amount of my life, I have been arrogant, tied to outcomes, impatient. Even now, as I type, I grow frustrated with various and sundry unchangeable things. I am human: egotistical, at times oblivious, forgetful, sometimes amazingly astute, other times clueless. And I have made mistakes aplenty.
BUT. . .I do believe in the power of positivity, the opportunity that loss affords in an uncertain world, and the fact that we all hold within us the keys to healing ourselves. It’s a matter of putting it into practice, a little more each day.
Someone said we need more poets as managers. We need them because they know what they believe, deep down. I am not a manager nor a published poet, but I am a poet, albeit one with an untrained voice, and I do know what I believe.
