Burdened by the blur
I spent last Friday in silence, tucked away at a retreat an hour from home.
I set aside time at the close of each year to reflect and plan for the upcoming year. Many years I’ve included friends or my spouse in this process. This year, I needed to be alone. I listened to that desire inside me and managed to get away for one night and two days.
Reflection has usually been my go-to tool for transforming blur into clarity. I take a set of unprocessed experiences and build a narrative that brings me ease and resonance. I navigate my way into a story that makes sense and clears the blur.
I didn’t find that this year. The blur didn’t clear. It’s still here.
The blur is from these two long years, the weight of enduring another year of the pandemic.
Within the blur is a longing for all the ways I thought things would unfold. I’m grieving the experiences that didn’t happen. I’m grieving the experiences I hadn't realized I longed for.
This is often how life works.
We keep going — putting one foot in front of the other. But when we arrive somewhere, we can’t feel what it’s like to be there. Often we lose sight of what we were wanting on our path to where we are. Yet we’re so aware it’s not present once we finally arrive.
This blur is grief
I bought a home in Bend, Oregon, in late 2019. I've lived here long enough that the white walls are not exactly white anymore. Yet little of my day-to-day experience resembles the life I thought I was embarking on with the move. I don't even know what that was anymore. I’ve forgotten, because it’s too painful to remember. Remembering requires giving air time to what the pandemic has taken. Instead some unlived experience haunts me.
I became a mom this year, fulfilling a desire that blossomed in me about a decade ago. I find my identity as a mom to be a much smaller piece of my life than I imagined it would be. It's lost in a sea of other changes the pandemic thrust on me. Just another change. I question if I’m a parent when so few people have seen me parent.
Our business evolved a lot this year. This business isn’t anywhere I would’ve imagined two years ago. Yet it’s thriving. Part of me still longs for its transformation to have been more intentional. Instead, necessity drove us to where we are today. Necessity to stop doing things in person and start doing things online. Another unexpected landing, thanks to the pandemic.
I’m not alone in my blur. What I’m feeling is the collective grief still present two years into the pandemic. It’s why so many of you replied with anecdotes of how you could relate to needing space or a reprieve from growth.
Earlier this year I attended a workshop led by a grief doula. She introduced me to the five gates of grief developed by one of her teachers, Francis Weller. Each of these gates is an entry point to grief. Any can create an experience where grief emerges to greet us:
The knowledge that everything you love you’ll eventually lose.
The places in you that have not received love.
The sorrows of the world.
What we expected and did not receive.
The ancestral grief we carry in our bodies.
In looking back at the years of the pandemic, I see myself approaching grief through all five gates.
The eventuality of loss feels more present when I sit in the loss of the last two years. Most of my mothering has been in isolation. I haven’t felt the mother in me receive love from many. The pandemic has left a trail of expectations never delivered. Our generation can, for the first time, feel the uncertainty and fragility experienced by generations past.
We are in a storm of grief.
When I see that storm for what it is — chaos and reckoning — I find release from the tendency to judge the blur. I’m gentle with myself when nothing feels easeful. The way I've always done things is no longer working. I’m still finding my way into whatever new way will support me moving forward.
Call for reflection:
What are you grieving? How can you honor that grief?
Shine On,
Alicia