Life has been really interesting lately. I've been meeting with a variety of other health and wellness pracitioners, and the conversations have been so enlightening. I love what people focus on, and and many of them have come to their practices after something cataclysmic has happened in their lives. Obviously, I get this deeply because that's why I'm here too. But what has been so curious to me is how many of these others have told me how brave I am to live the way I have after losing Bill.
This is truly not a humble-brag post at all because it's honestly a little strange. My immediate thought is: what other choice is there?
And, yes, I suppose there is choice involved. I could double down and insist that my own life is over. I could pretend that I could, somehow, find a portal to magically transport me back to the way life used to be. I could refuse any help and decide that pure inertia was the way to go. But honestly, I don't think any of those things happened because all I did was continue to live.
It might seem like I'm overly simplifying things when I word it that way but that's just what happened. Every day, I just kept waking up, despite my better inclinations sometimes. I kept getting out of bed. I kept going through each day the best I was able, even if that meant staying home and crying it out. Every day, start again. And eventually, little by little by little, the overwhelm of grief began to lift until I felt like I was more or less a functioning human again. That last part is up for debate.
The truth is that things always change, every day, all the time. Nothing can remain in one place or circumstance forever. It's impossible. We don't notice those imperceptible changes as life evolves and progresses because we're too close to it. But we've all experienced returning to a place we once loved - maybe it's our hometown, maybe it's our college town, maybe it's a city we used to live in - to find things to be very different. "This used to be my favorite restaurant," we say wistfully as we point to a new hipster bar. Our favorite shop is long gone, another has expanded, and there's a new apartment building where an empty lot once stood. If we had lived there consistently, these comings and goings would not have been remarkable because they're just part of life but when we're dropped down into it all at once, it seems that EVERYTHING has changed.
Day to day life is the same way. We notice those huge changes because they're so jolting, but we don't notice the little ones. But change is always there, always working. Those small, tiny evolutions can help us eventually lift out of grief into what our new life is. It's impossible to go back so we have no choice but to move forward.
So maybe bravery is really just waking up. It's a small, quiet bravery, but sometimes that's all we have. Just keep waking up, every day, and understand that this new day is different, just like the scores of others before.
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