“Be as a page that aches for a word that speaks on a theme that is timeless”.

Loss is universal, omnipresent and timeless, it happens to everyone, it can suddenly stun you, like a thunderbolt, or it can be drawn out and cold, dripping on your life like winter rain, either way it wreaks havoc and causes agonising pain.

All human beings feel the grief of loss, and it is not always death that robs us of loved ones. It can be harder to bear if someone leaves you out of choice, just stops loving you, and by deserting you, crushes your dreams, destroys your future and steals your self esteem.

When someone you love dies, or walks away from you, the loss will cause a wound, and like all wounds it will need time and attention before it will heal. At first we don’t want the wound to heal, we consider it a betrayal of our feelings, so we pick at it when we are alone and lonely, embracing the pain. It is a connection with our loved one we don’t want to lose.

Grief colours the world a suffocating grey and a fog of sadness hangs over everything we do either for a little while, or for a long time. Eventually we begin to notice our surroundings, people and places become important again and the healing has begun.

Gradually things start to change, as  a Chinese proverb says 'One joy shatters a hundred grief’s', and slowly and surely joy creeps in, to use a Sufi aphorism 'When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the soul laughs for what it has found'.

Losing a loved one drives us to states of extreme emotion and that can be exhausting, we need to rest up, let the wound heal and let small joys lift us slowly back into life again.

“Sob if you must parting is hell, but life goes on so sing as well”    Joyce Grenfell 

Title quote from Neil Diamond song

YESTERDAY IS NOT OURS TO RECOVER, BUT TOMORROW IS OURS TO WIN OR LOSE

Orison Swett Marden wrote “There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow”.  

Are you always impatient for tomorrow, excited about what the day might hold? Or are you fearful, anticipating the worst and dreading the challenge of another day. In anticipating tomorrows work load what is fearsome is too great a task. When undertaking a journey however long, looking too far down the road can make it seem endless, but we can only complete it one step at a time, and so it is with work.

 Thinking too deeply about what has to be completed often turns a small task into a mountain of work, and like all mountains when you are standing at the bottom, it is impossible to know if you can climb it because you can’t see the top. 

So we give in before we start, we convince ourselves we won’t be up to the task, and we are fixated on how many mistakes we will make, but the only way not to make mistakes is not to do anything.

We let fear take control; but fear feeds on itself, so fill yourself with courage. Sigmund Freud  said “Out of your vulnerability will come your strength”. All of us possess extraordinary powers deep inside us that can achieve anything if we allow them to surface and over power our doubts; so don’t put limits on what you will achieve tomorrow, tomorrows failures are still today’s ‘what ifs’.

“Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it”    Lucy Maud Montgomery

Title quote by Lyndon B Johnson

“ALL GREAT AND PRECIOUS THINGS ARE LONELY”

Being alone doesn’t always lead to feelings of loneliness, but being lonely always means feeling alone, yet they are two different ways of being. Henry Thoreau wrote “I love to be alone, I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude” and indeed it is of great comfort to enjoy your own company.

Loneliness on the other hand can be crippling, it's the feeling of living slightly on the outside, always looking in. It has nothing to do with being alone; it is easy to be lonely in a crowd or even within the warmth of your family. It is about belonging, if you don’t feel a connection with the people around you,  that invisible thread that weaves you into each others lives, you can find yourself  not living your own life but acting as an appendage to someone else’s,  never quite belonging and feeling lonely.

We are all lonely for something missing in our lives, sometimes without ever knowing what it is. We blame ourselves for not being able to live alone and be happy, and the lonelier you are the harder it is to stop looking for a reason, to face the world again and join in.

 "You cannot stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to to come to you.You have to go to them sometimes" said Winnie the pooh.

Feeling lonely does not have to become a way of life, it is temporary state, so if there is no one else, start to self nurture, make a mental list of all the compliments you have received and the good things people have said about you. Tell yourself how loveable you are, what a good friend you would make, and how much you like being you.

Don’t put your life on hold waiting for someone to share it with, if you go out and do things anyway, you will soon find other like minded people doing it too, and you already have a connection.

Title quote by Steinbeck

PROMISE LITTLE AND DO MUCH

Life is a series of plans, we all make them, what we want to do when we grow up, who we want to marry, how many children, where to roam and where to put down roots. We spend a lot of time making plans. It is easy to devise a plan that will make dreams come true and solve all problems, when it’s still in your head.

However planning is not achievement and achievement is only realised through action, as William Howells said “An acre of performance is worth a whole lot of promise”. There is great joy in planning; the incubation period is when hope is at its highest. Everything works on paper and if it hasn’t been tried no one can say it will fail.

It’s stepping out from the safety of your mind and exposing your idea to the criticism of others that takes courage. The execution of every plan worth producing is accompanied by doubt and insecurity and it is easy to despair at every set back. Edward burke wrote “Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair” because nothing is more powerful than persistence.

It is human nature that those around you witnessing your struggle will encourage you to give up, perhaps they cannot share your vision, people may protest your plan but they will applaud your performance, so change your plan if you have to, choosing another way is not the same as giving up, sometimes you must bend something to prevent it breaking altogether. Some anonymous person wrote “Better a has-been than a never-was, but better a never-was than a never-tried-to-be”. As an old American proverb goes, if you don't have a plan for yourself, you will become part of someone elses.

Title quote is a Hebrew Proverb

“NONE ARE MORE HOPELESSLY ENSLAVED, THAN THOSE WHO FALSELY BELIEVE THEY ARE FREE”

It’s a wonderful word freedom; it conjures up a life with no commitments, no responsibilities, the world stretched out in front of you with no one to hold you back.

 Dr Seuss stated “You have brains in your head; you have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own and you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” 

There are times when everyone longs to get away from people and the accountability they impose.  People consume time and energy we would rather spend on ourselves; but is being alone the same thing as being free?  If you had no one to think about but yourself would that make you free, or would it make you lonely.

Great minds ponder on whether if no one is there to hear a tree fall in the middle of the forest; does the sound of it falling actually exist?  In the same way does never having to explain or justify your actions make everything you do less important? If no one says “well done” is the deed diminished?

Most of us need to share life’s dramas in order to make sense of them and to give them meaning. We need to seek advice, receive praise, and gain sympathy.  If we have to become less free, to experience the comfort of feeling someone cares, we consider it a fair trade.

Gide wrote “To know how to free ones self is nothing, the arduous thing is to know what to do with ones freedom”,   

If you feel suffocated by the people around you and yearn to be free, take comfort in knowing that there will be times when you have to stand alone, and you will find satisfaction in proving that you can, but if you begin to wobble, it's reassuring to know that someone is there to catch you.  

Title quote by Goethe