I’ve found myself surrounded by death lately. Death of a friend, death of a season, death of old self, death of old ideas.
My younger self used to really struggle with change. I would wrestle within myself to maintain comfortable patterns, letting life be simple and inconsequential. Work the same job that’s comfortable, exercise my body just enough to feel balanced, meal prep the same foods for utility, enjoy the occasional movie, see some friends doing similar things. And then a dear friend passes suddenly.
Their imprint on my life was so special to me, and I knew this, but it did not strike me until reality came crashing. Not to take one person for granted, but the assumption that the circle was safe, the people I cared for were safe. I cannot help but wonder what I could have done differently.
How do you come to terms with such loss? I see the world at large struggling to come to terms with such strife, and I see that within myself as well.
And yet, as I write here now, I can’t help but feel the love around me as well.
As I’ve grown older, I find that the people I love provide me with strength, an armor of golden bricks around me, which in turn helps me blossom out of mourning, that death within me. I feel myself climbing out of a casket of sadness, to find family and friends surrounding me in loving embrace.
These dear people - to lose even one crushes the soul, but in turn urges me to press on and expand the heart.
I unconsciously (and now made consciously) wish is to begin again, to take this loss and transform it into a birth. Losing a dear friend and going through radical change has opened my eyes to truly live. The old adage of treating every day like your last is a tired trope, but when your own mortality hits you like a freight train… the feeling is sobering. I wish to move out of my mind and bring myself into the very present moment.
Breathing, moving my body, recognizing the beauty in the large and small. Here.