Meditating on Grief Made Me Want to Live More Deeply and Try New Things
How musings on grief and loss strengthened my resolve to live
As a freelance writer, I feel incredibly grateful to do what I love (and to get paid for doing it). Given everything that’s happening to all of us right now, I am thankful that I get to continue with my work from the comforts of my home and live with minimal disruptions. Apart from quarantine restrictions and anxiety that looms from within for being a natural sponge, everything feels manageable and I am basically, okay.
The past weeks and days, I’ve had a chance to confront my own discomfort. If I wasn’t doing what I do now, I wouldn’t have probably done it, but I feel like it’s out of a stroke of luck to be given the chance to work on writing assignments that enable me to dive deeper on a theme that is so deeply relevant to us right now: Grief and Loss.
I read, pondered, meditated on it, and wrote pieces from the depths of my heart. It didn’t come without feeling some broken parts of me coming to the surface.
For two weeks, I dove deeper into understanding more about grief than I have ever allowed myself to feel it. It felt incredibly difficult to write things in the beginning without tears welling up my eyes, as I simultaneously read the news and as I inevitably pondered on my own feelings.
We’re all somehow feeling grief at the moment. The more you’re tuned in to the news every day, the stronger you’ll feel it. All the more if you have lost someone you love very recently…from the pandemic or from whatever unfortunate circumstance.
My only advice is this: “go through it to get through it.”
There is no other way around grief, but to acknowledge your emotions and to sit with them for as long as you need to.
Grief is a process. It will take time for us to come out on the other side and find new meaning in our losses. But it promises that it will get us through in time. Grief, as hard as it sounds, will hit us all at some point; that is a fact. Life keeps giving us reasons to feel happy and to feel sad. The more you love something, the harder grief will hit you when that thing is taken away. But it’s also an incredible reminder that nothing is ever ours.
And so for every chance that we get to enjoy our lives, to love the people we’re with and to care for them, we must seize the opportunity.
Here’s what my feelings lately have led me to understand more about life:
Being reminded of my own mortality or those of other people around me and having meditated on grief and loss the past few days made me want to live more deeply. It set me free from my inhibitions, giving me the courage to try new things, even those I thought I’d never get around to doing.
What about you? I encourage you to sit with your feelings long enough to understand what your grief could be telling you.
It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.
— Aristotle
