A few months after Bill died, I drove around Northern California pretty endlessly and aimlessly.
I hadn't yet moved up to our house full time - a move that would be very short lived - but I was spending as much time as I could up there while still maintaining our rental in the Bay Area and trying to hold down my job.
Driving helped me a little bit because I just felt so lost and adrift that it matched my mood. I would drive around Clear Lake - sometimes, the entire circumference. Or I'd drive south over the mountains to Napa, or west to Mendocino. It didn't really matter - I just had to lose myself for a while in the world.
Northern California is magnificent in every sense of the word: it's rugged, expansive, massive, and gorgeous. It's hard to not be overwhelmed by how huge everything is, and exploring it helped me feel really, really small. I felt like a tiny creature crawling around a mountain and, believe it or not, that helped me feel a little better.
Feeling my own smallness certainly didn't lift the weight of loss and grief for me but it did help shift my perspective. I felt that I was a tiny creature with big feelings - just like all of us. While the circumstances of my loss might be unique to us, my feelings were not. Grief is a universal experience and understanding that helped ground me a little bit.
Feeling my own smallness also helped me understand that I've got nothing on Mother Nature. Watching those looming mountains, that huge lake, the horizon-less ocean - all teeming with life - helped me feel that life would go on no matter what. I may have felt like mine had stopped, but life was swirling all around me at every possible moment. The birds didn't care about my feelings anymore than the ants or the fish or the worms or the snakes did, nor should they. But they and I and we were all just trying to get through each day and survive.
And that, to me, was everything.
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