[8] I acknowledged the future
The heart of the suggested steps to Peace & Acceptance is contained in these steps describing the experience of grieving widows and widowers.
Meetings focus on working through the steps, often in a repeating pattern as more learning is revealed to us on our journey. There is often no linear progression.
When we go through these extreme periods of grief and loss, one of the very difficult to accept is the loss of our assumed future. We live life with a past and a history, and we create a story about what that history will turn into in the future, and we project that.
We have an assumed future of the way we think.
We think things are going to be a certain way, and we call that future ‘normal’.
We call our past ‘normal’.
Except, right now, this exquisite moment, this is ‘normal’ – it may not be our old projected normal, it may be a new normal – but it is still normal.
When someone dies we have a tendency to drift into the future in our mind and compare what we now perceive as our future, to what we used to perceive as our future, and we say things are not normal, “When will things return to normal?”
Acknowledging that the future exists and that our future is incredibly different to the future that we thought we were going to have is vital.
Now, that doesn’t mean our future can’t be great and wonderful, it just means our future will be different to our assumed future.
This step is about acknowledgement of the fact and an awakening to the fact of, “Hey, my actual future is gonna be different to my assumed future”
Thinking prompts for this step
If you wish you may find it helpful to use these as prompts to guide your thinking when it’s your turn to share during any group meeting.
- What is your definition of normal
- If you could talk to the old you, what would you tell the old you that used to have that assumed future?
- What feelings does your new future bring about for you?