A New Season, A New Experience of Grief

Monday, September 22, 2014

It’s no wonder so many people are medicated.

That was a thought I had while eating a bit of dinner immediately after work today.  The television screens never seem to rest in the Abbott Northwestern Hospital cafeteria.  And they often seem to be tuned to channels sharing a voluminous amount of discouraging news.  I caught a few snippets of coverage regarding ISIS in the Middle East.  I am not sure what I consider the bigger crisis in the world right now.  Is it geopolitical instability in the Middle East and the threat of inflamed tensions and religion inspired violence in Europe and the United States?  Or is it the fact that we continue to release prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere year after year?  There is certainly plenty of crisis to spread around the world.  Is it any wonder my thoughts drifted to the topic of the highly medicated society that is the United States of America?

I personally had a good day.  Work was not exceedingly demanding of me.  I enjoyed working a partial day after arriving at work later in the morning than I usually would.  It was another gorgeous September day filled with brilliant sunshine.  It’s difficult to be sad during the bright, clear, temperate days of early autumn.  And yet I felt a tremendous sadness come over me near the end of my workday.  I know some of the sadness is inextricably bound up in the grief I am still working through.

A new season is announcing itself.  And yet I continue to hammer away at the same ancient grief.  This new season offers me the chance to look upon my ‘old’ grief in a new way.  I believe our ability to heal is very much connected to our ability to see our own lives, and the world at large, in a new way that is unencumbered by our earlier life experience.  It’s certainly not necessarily easily done.  It can be so very easy to get caught up in our egos.  Conscious healing takes conscious choice.

My current sadness and grief is very different from what I experienced this time a year ago.  I feel within myself a growing strength.  I am collecting all the disparate pieces of myself through the process of therapeutic inquiry. 

As I end this piece of spontaneous writing (I had planned my piece from this morning to be my only piece of the day) I can’t help but look at a little girl riding in front of the bus I am on.  An imprint of lipstick on her cheek shows the memory of a kiss.  I wonder who kissed her.  Perhaps it is the woman sitting next to her who I assume is her mother.

Before the Sun passes out of the sign of Virgo this evening and thereby marks the official beginning of Autumn I feel like shouting out to the sky above me how much I want kisses and love.  I need love.  And I want a man who knows how to kiss…a lot.  It would be a wonderful surprise to have such a man in my life.

……

My weekly German language class that meets on Monday evenings provided me some good fodder for reflection.  At one point in the class we listened to a DVD featuring a interview on the topic of luxury.  I have previously written about what some might assume is the opposite of luxury, namely poverty.

Luxury is something of a strange subject due in part to the fact that what people conceive luxury to be is so very subjective.  If you grow up as a pauper then you may imagine a single night stay in a five star hotel just once in your life would be the very defining experience of incredible luxury.  If you grow up poor and surrounded by polluted land and water living in a community surrounded by healthy land and water could appear to be a luxury.  If I recall correctly having clean water to drink is something beyond the reach of about one billion people currently living in the world.  Even the poorest Americans are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world.

During the last twelve to fifteen months I have given a lot of thought to what I want to ultimately do with the remainder of my life.  I have been reminded of the preciousness of the time I have already lived.  I now have a renewed sense of the urgency of living each day of my life in a deliberate and thoughtful way.

I came to an important conclusion just yesterday.  I want my future work to feature giving people experiences they value which will ultimately become memories that they will cherish for a lifetime.  So the industry I want to find my way into is one that offers people meaningful experiences. 

I have also (recently) discerned that I want my future work to also include a focus on cultivating meaningful relationships.  In some way I can trace the origin of my desire to do such work to my relationship with my own father.  I do not know that I ever really truly knew the man my father was…and now is.  It is my impression that the use of deceit as a means of coping with ambiguity, uncomfortable questions and difficult social problems is something he still might be all too inclined to engage in even now.  It is so very sad when I ponder how my decision to sever my relationship with my father for the foreseeable future (if not permanently) is something I chose after coming to the sobering conclusion that my father still cannot fully comprehend the full consequences of how he chose to live his life throughout the past many, many years.

Perhaps I can draw something of immense value from the painful grief I have been (consciously) wading through these last fifteen months.  Perhaps somehow I can transmute my disappointment in my relationship with my father into a determination to live a life of integrity that will include conscious focus on cultivating healthy relationships.  In this way I may be able to create light from darkness.

I will be meeting with my placement specialist from Rise, Inc. this Wednesday.  Before I meet with her I plan to spend some additional time contemplating and visualizing the work I wish to do in the future.