Listening to the Changes

Photo my Marcel T.

On my walk today, I saw how fall is leaning into winter, how the changing seasons lead to endings and from those endings comes new life and new beginnings.     

Death can do that. Death can make people come alive and bring new beginnings. This may sound like a strange statement to make but I’ve witnessed it in my own life and in the many stories clients have shared with me over the years. Death has the power to awaken life.

The death of someone close and dear to us cuts us off at the knees, leaves us gasping for our next breath and grappling with how to keep moving forward in a world that keeps spinning around us when our own seems to have come to a halt.

At first, we barely manage to go through the motions but eventually strength comes from God knows where, and we manage to stumble our way through the days with some kind of semblance of having reappeared in the so called “normal” world.

Only we know there is no such thing as normal and we no longer are who we once were. We are different. We have been thrown face first into the intensity of the present moment and the pain and heaviness it carries.  

The superfluous falls away and is replaced with a deepening of the soul that I can only describe as a need to cut the bullshit. A thirst for what is important, for what matters, for understanding, for truth and a need to sink our teeth into life as it unfolds. In this way, death can and often does make people come alive.

It makes us, as Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born American Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor said, “think higher and feel deeper.” To think higher and feel deeper, whether we are touched by the death of a loved one or not, is something that all of us need to aspire every day to do.

Drop judgments, put a stop to gossip, do away with apathy, blame, discrimination of yourself and others or numbing with drugs, alcohol, or food in order not to feel. Why not dive head first into the life we are fortunate to have? Why not think higher, feel deeper and listen to what is trying to come alive.