Winter always gets me reflecting; on times passed, people lost and old ways of being. The long nights and cold days can have a contemplative quality when I allow myself time to rest, free of distraction. I find it can bring a kind of bittersweet melancholy, not wholly unpleasant but far from ecstatic. A quiet, poignant opening of the heart.
I find it a time to put the striving to rest, to lower expectations and see what resides below the surface.
This year, I’ve been reflecting on the ways I navigated grief as a younger man. On my inability to live up to my ideal of the person I would have liked to have been as I traversed the initiation of loss. As a 36-year-old, I can forgive my immaturity, we learn through doing and death and loss are no different. Most people will have some regrets about their way of being during their first experiences of loss, things they wish they would have said or not said, ways of being, or the quality of their presence.
It's important to be honest with ourselves about these regrets so that we are able to grow and hopefully bring that maturity to difficult situations yet to emerge in our lives. However, I think this self-reflection must always come from a gentle, forgiving place. We are all learning, and no one will ever get it all right.
My parents planted me a Sumac tree when my friend Oli died and a few years ago little Forget Me Not flowers appeared around the bottom of the trunk. This week I played an album that Oli first played me as a teenager, and the message of the song spoke directly to problems I had been agonising over in recent months. The universe speaks to us if we are listening, but we must be open enough to hear its language.
Ancient people have always looked for the dead in the whisper of the wind or in the dancing light upon the ocean. As modern people, we have lost our connection to this way of experiencing; we either completely dismiss all talk of the transcendent, or we naively buy into every charlatan who claims to have a private connection with the other side.
I think it’s more subtle and ineffable than that. I think Steinbeck said it best in my favourite book of all time ‘To a God Unknown’.
‘A man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness’.
I feel the ripples of those I love still living on in me in the books I read, the music I love and the philosophies that shape my world. As long as we keep those we love in mind they never truly die. I just hope that my ripples can be remembered with the same quality of love as those that have been left for me.
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