Tag: possibility
Life as a Book
Life as a Book
“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
Alfred D’Souza
I read those words yesterday and they hit home, they hit home pretty hard.
I enjoyed lunch yesterday with a good friend (thanks Emma) and we were talking about the ‘when/then’ game. When the kids have left home then it would be better. When I’ve moved house then I can relax. When/then.
Claire and I used to joke that we would write a book called “It’ll be better when…” and then make jokes about all of the times that we had used that expression or heard other people use it, perhaps that’s a project of the future, but thinking about it now really does make me stop and consider things.
What has opened up for me now is a completely new chapter in my life, I thought I knew where the story was going until I turned the page on 17 April and the great author in the sky decided to take the story in a different direction. I can see now that those early chapters were leading me in a direction and I had made up my own ending, I was pinning all of my hopes on chapters I was yet to read, life was going to begin in those chapters.
But as I sit here writing this down I can see the entire book, it’s closed so I’ve no idea where the story goes, but I can see that this IS my life. It doesn’t begin over the page, it began at the beginning of the book and I’m in it now, this is it, these obstacles ARE my life.
There is a lot to be said for writing the end of the book ourselves and creating our future as we go, and there is also a lot to be said for reading the words of the page that we are on, reading them slowly, reading them with meaning and most of all enjoying them.
I’ve no idea what is over the page, at the moment I have no idea what the next paragraph says, but I do know that for the time being at least, I’m going to read those words very slowly.
Willing to Consider
Willing to Consider
You may remember me talking about an excellent book I’m reading called “Seven Choices”, it really is helping enormously. Up until Thursday of last week I was struggling with the concept of letting go. Why would I want to let go of something which was so perfect? The idea of letting go of the relationship that Claire and I had was not something I was even willing to consider, until I read the most recent chapter in Seven Choices.
I have realised that I don’t need to let go of anything at the moment, of course in time I need to readjust to a new way of life but all I need to do at the moment is to be willing to consider this new way of life. That’s the first step, just a willingness to consider things. The book also talks about incorporating my loss into this new life. That was also something I hadn’t considered before, I was just imagining that the past was the past, it was done with and we move on.
That was too painful to even consider and so the idea of working with the loss, incorporating the loss somehow into my life feels much more acceptable and doable. I can indeed be willing to consider a new way of life which incorporates the loss, that feels so much better than the idea of letting go.
Exactly what that means practically I’m not sure yet. My next step is to begin to work out what that new life will look like, and to take active steps towards achieving it. New routines and new plans will allow me to continue life and live it to its maximum, all the while incorporating the loss of Clare into it. Not ignoring the loss, but working with it. It won’t go away, how can it? It’s happened and that can’t be undone but I can forge a new life building the loss of Clare into it.
If I had to put some kind of scale to it with 0 being at the beginning of the process and 10 being complete, then I’d put myself at about 0.25 at the moment. I’ve just begun. The pain is still immensely raw. Every night, and I literally mean every night, I look to the empty side of the bed and am reminded of what I’ve lost. In fact I am reminded of what I’ve lost every waking second as I walk around this house.
But I am willing to consider the possibility of a new life. Just being willing is a start and something to build on, and build on it I shall.
The Paradox of Despair
The Paradox of Despair
I’m currently reading an excellent book called “Seven Choices – finding daylight after loss shatters your world” by Dr Elizabeth Harper Neeld. It’s the account of Dr Neeld as she works through the emotions she feels after the loss of her husband to a very sudden death. Her story resonates deeply with my own situation.
Some of the things she writes are especially challenging and I’d like to share one of those challenging thoughts here.
Something which she has picked up on, which I strongly recognise, is the double loss of losing someone so close, not only have we lost the person as an individual but we have also lost our “Assumed Future”. We all have an assumption about how our future will pan out, even if it is not explicitly written in a life goal (as mine was) we will have a general feeling or an idea about where life is taking us.
Visits to the park, Christmas’ shared, birthdays celebrated together and even things further off – we imagine growing old, how life will be once our own children have grown up and the time we can share with each other in the future.
I’m not just talking about myself here, I’m talking about Claire’s sister, brother, mum, dad and my own kids. We all had an assumption about how life could possibly be in the future and we now have to face the loss of that as well as the loss of Claire herself. In fact anyone that knew Claire would also have had these assumptions about the future and how they would share their lives together in years to come.
This deep loss leads us to a place of despair. Despair is a word, indeed an emotion which I have never considered before. Of course I knew what the word meant academically, but now I know what it means to experience it myself.
As Dr Neeld points out, and this takes some deep thought, the fact that we are experiencing this despair means that our assumptions have been destroyed, and when assumptions are destroyed it opens up enormous possibilities. Wow, what a paradox!
When I did my creativity module of my MBA we spent many months looking at how assumptions by people in business stifle creativity and how breaking down those assumptions about their ‘given future’ in their career would massively help the business and greatly improve creativity. Without assumptions all we are left with is possibilities.
And there is the irony!
The truth is that if we feel that despair then we also have a world of possibilities. The challenge now is to allow those possibilities to happen at the same time as giving despair the respect it deserves.
Claire. My head knows that this is the truth and this is the kind of discussion I truly miss. Ironically, we could have spent a couple of hours discussing this and I know in my heart that you would have come to the same conclusion. You would have recognised the paradox of despair and possibility, indeed with your counselling training you may already have done so. I’m not going to lie, my heart feels differently. All I can feel at the moment is despair, I know the possibilites are out there and I guess that the first stage is recognising that – accepting and looking for those possibilities is something I can work towards. Goodnight sweetheart, I love you.