Lose, Love, Live. Dan Moseley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and expanding life.

      When my granddaughter was four years old, her baby teeth began to fall out and she smiled her toothless smile. She was scared when the first one fell out, but her fear eased when she put it under her pillow and received money from the tooth fairy. Now she is proud—new teeth are coming in. She is excited about the new teeth. Her fear faded as she grew in the confidence that new teeth would replace the ones that were lost. Had she not lost those teeth, there would have been no room for new teeth. To lose is to live.

      How do we learn to live with loss? How do we find the courage to embrace the empty space that creates room for new life?

      Growing through Grieving

      Living well through loss involvess learning how to grieve. Grieving teaches us to live again in the absence of someone or something significant. Grieving isn’t just a time of unbearable emptiness and tears but a whole process of becoming a new person shaped by the memory of what is lost, not defined by it.

      Grieving enables us to become a person who has experienced a divorce, not a divorced person. It enables us to become a person who has lost a partner, not a widow. It enables us to become a person who has experienced the loss of a job, not a loser. Grieving enables us to know ourselves as persons who lose something when change occurs, not as people who are losers.

      Therefore grieving is a process that takes time. It is not an easy process if the loss for which you grieve represented a defining reality in your life. The amount of time grieving takes is related to the depth of the loss. When a young man loses an important basketball game, he will go through this process relatively quickly. The process helps him attend to the pain of the loss and become free of that pain, so it won’t define how he plays the next game. He will be shaped by the loss but not controlled by it. A woman whose husband dies the year before he is due to retire will take longer to find the new life through this process of grieving and growing. Her identity and self-understanding have developed over a number of years, and the losses will be more complex and multidimensional.

      The process of grieving involves pain because it is a birthing process, a stretching and tearing that opens the way for a new spirit to emerge. It requires the knitting together of painful and pleasant memories to discover a new way of understanding ourselves.

      As I worked on this process in my own life, I did a great deal of reading and study of spirituality and growth. I came to realize that the process of grieving loss, of learning to live in the absence of someone or something significant, parallels what many religions call a spiritual pilgrimage. To grow spiritually isn’t simply the practice of reading about the good ideas of others; it is about the way we process the changes in our lives, about the way we travel from death to life as we move from what is lost to what is yet to love. Spiritual growth is about living through a breaking, stretching, aching, remaking process of letting go of that which is gone and taking on a life formed in response to what is becoming.

      Those who practice spiritual disciplines know that emptiness and loss are the womb for rebirth. They discipline themselves to create silence—space empty of words—in which their hearing is sharpened to hear more. In the closing of their eyes to the bright light of sight, they see what can only be seen in the dark. In the fasting from food, they experience the nourishment that comes from a hungry body. When they give alms, they learn that true wealth comes from an empty space in the wallet. When they offer hospitality, they discover the gifts of strangers who now have space in the empty chair at the table. Spiritual growth is about loss and emptiness. It is the result of space that is created when what we have trusted to hold us is not present.

      Death and Rebirth

      In my childhood home, words were sovereign. They were fed to me with my mother’s milk. I learned to relish them and to trust them. As I learned to speak, my parents constantly reminded me how to speak correctly. They taught me that there are words that build up and words that tear down. If I used words that tore down (telling my brother he was “stupid,” for instance), I paid a high price. If I used words that my mother felt demeaned the human enterprise (like “damn” or “hell”), I was required to go pick my own switch and roll up my pant legs. I became a student, and spoken and printed words fed my mind. I became a singer, and poetic words dressed in notes became my soul’s food.

      After the series of deaths and losses that invaded my life over a decade ago, however, words died for me. They lost their power. I lost my voice. I realized that words are like dust—cast to the wind and scattered, seldom having the lasting effect one desires.

      The result was my inability to read or write. I lost the focus necessary to follow a sentence across the page and hold its meaning in my mind. I tried writing but could not develop any confidence in it.

      When I spoke in public, I felt tentative—stumbling and qualifying. I came to realize that the mind in chaos has a hard time taking words into itself and ordering them into any sense. Because my mind couldn’t process the way it was accustomed to, I discovered I was much more in touch with my body and my soul. My heart was also confused, and I couldn’t stay in relationships very well. I realized these losses had effectively driven me out of my mind and into my body, out of my heart and into my soul.

      After several years of struggle, I was surprised by a realization that freed me to put these words down on a page and send them out to others in a book. One crisp fall day, I was hiking in the forest that has become my playground and sat on a bench looking at what I call the broccoli tree. (It looks like a hundred-foot stalk of broccoli.) As the last of the late-autumn leaves drifted to the ground, I had a deep sense of sadness. I realized the words I had spoken most of my life were much like the fallen leaves. My words had fallen from my lips and turned brown. The smell of decay was in the air. Most of the words by which I had made my living had long ago disintegrated. They were not remembered, nor were they framed and put on a wall.

      As I pondered this process, I settled into a deep sense of contentment. Yes, the leaves fall and die. Yes, the words fall on people’s ears and die. The decaying leaves become the humus that nourishes the tree and becomes the fertile home for the gestation of new seedlings. Maybe that is what words do—they are not to live forever. They are simply designed to fall and die and silently and perpetually fertilize the new life that emerges from the earth.

      As I came to this understanding, I was released from my block and decided I could write again. Then as I was relaxing in the crisp fall sun, an acorn fell and struck me right on top of my head. All the fluttering, descending leaves had spoken so gently and then suddenly, one hard little acorn dropped from nowhere and made its point. Only a few words make an impact. The rest do their work of decay and death, becoming humus for the nurturing of new life.

      This book is intended to be both brown leaves and hard acorns. It is a result of the journey from trust and confidence in the life I had been given, the collapse of that life, and the emergence of new life and understanding.

      In this book you will be invited to explore ten dimensions of reality we experience as we learn to embrace the new and leave the old. You will be encouraged to explore your suffering and open yourself to rebirth as the gift that comes to those who pay attention to their lives and who have the courage and patience to discover the gifts that are a part of losing, loving, and living.

      As the ten dimensions of experience common to loss are identified, you are invited to recognize them in your own journey, to attend to your feelings and your thoughts as you experience them. I encourage you to slow down and explore the gifts that come through these experiences. (“A Discovery Journal” at the end of this book will help you write your way through your loss and into new life.) I believe that when you work your way through your loss in this way, you will find new parts of yourself and new resources for living a rich and vital life in the future.

      In this book we will also СКАЧАТЬ