Disregarding Timelines

Honoring the natural rhythm of grief

Something interesting is happening.

I’ve noticed that I am no longer tracking artificial timelines, in terms of resisting (or clinging to) other people’s adherence to them. Rather, I am acutely attuned to the grief process as a whole, and how it’s naturally shifting and changing. While it feels important to mark the proverbial turns around the wheel, the smallest of things can bring loss ever-closer, as though it happened just yesterday, making the question of time irrelevant.

I’m viewing grief as an emergent process - no longer counting the hours, days, weeks, months. I’m giving myself permission to attend to loss in my own way, thus forging my own evolving bundle of responses. I’ve gotten more adept at exploring ways of doing grief for the long haul - which includes employing coping mechanisms that are hardy, accessible, sustainable.

This feels like a mini-revelation. I can soften around bracing against challenging feelings, systems, people. I can appreciate that what’s arising in this moment is the truest thing I can encounter.

If the felt sense of loss is what’s here, then I can acknowledge this. If difficult memories and flashbacks are part of the now, I can work with them in ways that bring me closer to what is stable and nourishing. I can remind myself that, while thoughts and sensations are powerful, they are also just thoughts and sensations.

I have become practiced at the art of validating the energetic signature of grief; its intelligence, mystery and shapeshifting capacity. For example, if I see grief as an enemy, so shall it be. If I view it, however, as a catalyst to connection, I am touching into something that feels inherently true about this deeply soulful journey of being human.

Maybe grief just wants to be noticed. Maybe its particular way of being is to emerge and recede through the wild waves of experience. Maybe it’s doing something, unearthing something, creating something.

We learn to write by writing, just as we learn mindfulness through the small and steady points of practice. Likewise, we learn to grieve by grieving, strengthening a muscle we never knew we contained. We also learn a new way to love, by making space for the complexity of loss and all its accompanying challenges.

Perhaps we discover who we’re becoming by pausing long enough to shine a generous light on these ripening nuances. Perhaps this very exploration illuminates aspects of ourselves which can be admired for their bravery, vulnerability, tenacity, richness.

Despite all of my grief education training, I have learned the most through sheer proximity. It is only by engaging with something intimately that we come to know it - by feeling, questioning, witnessing, listening.

I have also learned a great deal about grief through what it’s not, and all the ways it is misunderstood. The grief process is not about overcoming (or even befriending), and it’s definitely not about getting to some future state devoid of its presence. The truth is, we need grief, just as we need hope, movement, connection; and we need to trust our desire to turn away from spaces that deny its existence.

So, let’s not double down on the fickle promise of forced positivity. Let’s allow the glittering edges of grief to reveal themselves in their own way, in their own time. Let’s cast our luminous nets out into the waters of what-else, and see what treasures await.

While I’m disregarding unhelpful timelines, I’m also very aware that I’m entering into what has proven to be a heavy season for me; rife with the residue of tragic happenings. I don’t know what I’ll encounter on this particular turn around the wheel - but if grief demands my attention, I have faith in my ability to respond.

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