Getting out of bed in the morning has always been hard. This morning, however, I realized more deeply what it is I don’t want to face as the alarm goes off or my eyes blink open… Why I would nearly always prefer to close them again and drift back into the world of dreams, challenged to find a sense of compelling anticipation at the start of my days.
It’s not because I don’t enjoy my life or my days, or love the people I interact with. It’s because often, in my heart first thing in the morning, is grief.
A heavy feeling, a feeling of dread, a weight of sorrow that doesn’t make any sense next to my privileged, really-fairly-relaxed-compared-to-most-humans-on-this-Earth, schedule and itinerary for the day.
But this morning was different. Today I was able to pause long enough - before pouring coffee into my system and checking emails - to be more honest with myself. To just pause for a second and ask, ‘Hang on a moment, what am I really feeling here?’. To remind myself, with care, ‘Ruth, it is OK to feel hard things. Just feel what you are feeling, you know this, just open, slowly, slowly… feel what is here. You will be OK.’ And then, to actually allow my attention to open into my chest, belly and heart and to admit… ‘Oh… sadness… I just feel really, really sad’.
And as I gently opened into the feeling more, letting tears fall and holding my mind with its reason-finding at bay, I could start to see why it has been so very hard for me to even begin to compute these feelings of sadness. I could see that of course it is hard to acknowledge feelings of sadness when the external realities of my life suggest zero justification for this type of feeling. When we’ve been told that we’re deeply fortunate (which I am) and that we’re living the privilege of the 1% (which I am)... of course it can feel discontinuous, out of place, surprising, childish even, to ‘succumb’ to feelings of sorrow.
I could see also this morning, that rather than even begin to acknowledge these feelings in myself, there has typically been instead a general resistance to entering the flow of the day. A swelling feeling of anxiety, followed by a panic/caffeine-induced flurry of falsely-deemed ‘important activity!’ requiring a fairly severe disconnection from myself and whatever I might actually be feeling.
But thankfully this morning was different; I somehow had new strength or commitment or maybe the feeling was just so undeniably present that I simply couldn’t ignore it anymore. And as I slowly allowed myself to admit and cry and write… I could feel more life returning to me. I could feel truth, like life-force, returning to my veins.
I’m not sure that acknowledging grief is ever easy. It’s a hard feeling. In my experience, it is inherently the door I do not want to open. The floor opening up beneath me. The crumbling of my tower of whatever-dreams. It is cool blue dusk taking inevitable dominion over the warm oranges and pinks as the last edge of sun sinks below the horizon. It augurs endings and interrupts our illusions, even the ones we love most ferociously. In my experience, however, this is also part of what grief is and teaches us. It is a sort of taming force, saying loudly, you are not in charge! Clawing us by our guts and our hearts back into bowed relationship with the Greater Whole.
It is also my experience however, that when I surrender to its downward pull. Admit and fall into its cavernous and aching dark… life actually gets better on the other side.
The thing is that sorrow points to pain, internal pain. And that internal pain is there for a reason. It always is. It is there because something isn’t working or something isn’t seen or something just fucking hurts. Acknowledging it often inevitably opens the door for some sort of deeper truth to emerge, and that deeper truth often means change, greater or different responsibility, new, different choices… and maybe more loss. Given all of this, of course we at times resist turning this key that is the feeling of our sorrow.
On top of this, we live in a world that has mostly relegated sorrow to the status of ‘negative feeling’. Something to be avoided. Something ‘unproductive’. Hell, even something that harms others or ‘brings them down’. While there are definitely more and less constructive ways to be with feeling (for ex: feelings need to be felt, not intellectually circled over or thought or dialogued about), our world - to its detriment - still seems to tend to err on the side of denial, avoidance and sugar-coating.
I remember this when I was in the deep, acute grief of a personal and tragic loss… how most people seemed to think/feel that the kind thing to do was to help me stay away from my pain… when the complete opposite was true. How the greatest gift friends and family gave me at the time was the space, directness and lack of fixing to allow me to sink directly into it. And I write this here not at all to be judgemental of those who didn’t know or do this, but mostly to reinforce in myself this crucial reminder.
Surely the greatest gift we can give those we love is actually the space and room, and lack of fixing to allow them to be in and with their pain!
Because that pain has great wealth and great message.
Truth and pain are linked. If we can’t or won’t or don’t feel our pain… then we are in fantasy. And I think collectively, in North American society, perhaps most other places as well, we have been in fantasy for a long time. Buying ourselves into stupors to then literally just bury our trash out of sight…
Like it somehow goes away when we do that.
It does not go away when we do this. It festers. And the pain grows, until we will have the willingness and capacity to feel it.
The feeling of the pain is actually a necessary ingredient to grow the will to do something about it. So how on earth can we create a better world together, if we cannot actually acknowledge our pain?
And so, I am so grateful to this sorrow this morning, and I am grateful to all of the influences and supports and such a rich network of people I love, that have enabled me enough wherewithal to take time and feel it today.
And though I am still not entirely sure what it is all about, I do know that it feels real and grounding and trustworthy, and that when and as I feel it, it transforms. I do know that I feel better for feeling this sorrow, than not.
It feels like this sadness may be here to remind me of the things that truly are hard, difficult and tragic… that there are plenty of these and they are real. Things like homelessness and addiction, like so many humans spending their days on tasks that don’t remotely make use of their gifts and creativity, like a friend struggling to protect her children in a difficult legal system, like so many people I know feeling lonely and isolated, like being far away from my family. These things are actually sad for me. Perhaps they actually deserve to be cried for?
And contrary to the view I think my mind has unconsciously held… that in feeling sorrow I will somehow get sucked into a bottomless well of self-pity, it feels instead like as I acknowledge this feeling present in my system, the air starts to clear. It feels like I start to be able to see the world around me more vividly. It feels like these things I am sorrowful over begin to take their real places, momentos of true value on a shelf of precious and meaningful things.
And somehow, strangely, even without any new answers this morning, just the tears on my desk, life actually feels like it somehow makes more sense.
