The Contrast of Love and Loss

Grief is overwhelming. It consumes you.

It feels like it’s never ending and if you step into feeling the depths of the pain buried inside, you’ll never come out of it.

It feels like a bottomless pit of despair. Sitting with the loss of someone we love feels unbearable, it feels unfair, as if that’s not the way things were supposed to go, it shouldn’t be happening like this, to us.

The question of why digs deeper, as if to try and out dig the well of despair. As if I could just dig deep enough and understand why - the pain of loosing that person will feel less. It will be more manageable because I understand why and I can make sense of things. But that’s the thing about loosing someone you love, even if you can make sense of why they have left, it doesn’t make the pain go away. And in the end it’s something we have to feel in order to fully process our experience.

Loss is part of growth. With every metre, centre meter, inch we grow, we gain a new perspective and say goodbye to the old. Every part of being alive is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. Just as our cells in our body die everyday in order to regenerate and keep us alive, new ones are formed to replace them.

Grief becomes our new relationship to what we have lost. It feels messy and hard and painful - and if we don’t allow ourselves to process our experience with what’s been lost, we rob ourselves of the growth, rebirth, regeneration - as well as the gift of seeing our experience from a new perspective.

Grief is not like any other emotion, it doesn’t have an outcome, it’s not something you can “shift” or move through. It’s something you have to be with. And over time your relationship to what was lost begins to transform naturally.

To love it the greatest risk of all, and it takes a lot of Courage. Because everything we ever love we will lose. And that’s what it is to be love and be living.

Being in and embracing this ever changing, ever growing death and rebirth cycle, while having the courage to continue to risk it all.

That’s what makes life so beautiful. The contrast of Love and Loss is what makes life special, exciting and enjoyable.

Because without it, we wouldn’t know what it feels like to truely live ❤️