It's been such a strange week.
They speak of grief as happening in stages. Not definably– stage one being denial, stage two acceptance; or any crap like that. But grief is such a solid, intrepid, all consuming emotion; a block of feeling rather than lacy strings of it. And it does happen in stages. Huge chunks of time– weeks and months– pass while you look at the world from behind a pane of glass that is colored with how your loss effects your life at that point in time.
And then suddenly, the color changes. You gain a new perspective, you shift slightly further away from the pain. And the world's a different place all over again.
Then you glance back over the way you’ve been living through that last stage, how you've navigated yourself through that particular colored fog, and you wonder how the fuck you've lived through that, and why you weren't more aware of it while it was happening.
It's just grief... it gives you blinkers, blinds you things not directly in your twisted field of vision. I’m fairly aware of my own mind, I know myself well... and I still catch myself by surprise.
That's what's happened this last week or so. It begin with that niggling feeling that yellowed bitterness was becoming the hue of the lense I was looking through, for most of my time. And, as just seems to happen sometimes, simply being aware of that was enough to begin a shift in my perspective.
The universe likes to kick us up the butt sometimes, remind us of what's real. It can be in the simplest of things. One of them was a blog post by the awesome Carly Findlay. Read it. Fuck yes. I love Carly.
Happy is a choice.
Last Sunday, an Aussie celebrity chef buried his entire family. All of them. His wife, three daughters. And was himself still not well enough to attend their funeral, three months after the fire that gutted their home, took his girl’s lives, and left him with burns to forty percent of his body.
Pain is relative, and I am blessed. I need to stop focusing on why it's so damn difficult, and love my children for what they are– my entire world, my whole existence.
And I think the final adjustment needed for a full vision overhaul was a conversation with a friend of mine, who we’ll call The Doctor. I watched as he tried, over and over again, to reflect some kind of light onto my suffering. I witnessed myself call it lies, over and over again- karma doesn't even out, love is purely biological, these things don't happen for a reason, loving myself has nothing to do with others loving me.
And then I saw... myself. Refusing hope. Turning my back toward any kind of comfort, or philosophy, or lights at the end of tunnels. Shedding optimism and letting go of any believe in love.
What a sad, sad way to live.
That's not me.
I can do that, if I choose. I can wail and cry unfair and remind everyone, over and over, that the world has treated me badly, if it believe that to be true.
And what does that leave me with?
Not much. A horrible, grey, sparse, sterile world to exist in for a few more decades.
I've been asking the Universe, demanding of it- proof. Some kind of proof. Show me something. If things happen for a reason, prove it to me. If good things will happen, show them to me. Give me a reason to have faith in karma and fate.
What a stupid thing to ask for, when the essence of faith is believing in things that can't be proved.
The world owes me nothing. Least of all a reason to believe in it.
But the choice is mine. I can choose to believe that there is nothing behind anything, nothing that twines people together, no higher power of even higher consciousness. I can choose to forget everything I used to believe in, in the Before.
But nothing comes from nothing. Believe in nothing, and I guess that's what you'll get.
Or I can choose to have trust in... something. I don't know what it is. Fate. Karma. Equilibrium or serendipity or whatever you want to call it. And it costs me nothing, except a leap of faith. And if my faith never amounts to anything, if karma never rights itself and I live the rest of my life in pain... then I guess I'll spend a long time having faith in a hollow nothing at all. And I may be disappointed, when it's all said and done.
But, secretly, I'd be disappointed at the end of it anyway. I'd rather live with hope– see the world through a lighter colored lense– then feel the way I have been the last few weeks.
I'm still not sure what I believe in, now, in the After. Still not the God I can't say deserted me, but never answered and practical prayer I put his way.
But... something. Something like what I wrote about in the Before. And that's better than nothing at all.