HUG Corner – Thought for the Week 5/15/17
May 15, 2017
From “Healing After Loss” Martha Whitmore Hickman
“Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadness’s with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”
— Maria Rainer Rilke
These times of grieving the loss of a loved one are times of change. It is as though we leave forever a room where we have been comfortable and functioning well, and enter a new room. Some of the same furnishings are there, and some of the same people, but the room is different nonetheless and requires a whole new adaptation from us—and, probably, from the others in the room with us.
We have choices. We can hide in a corner, cowering, unwilling to look around. We can tear around mindlessly, looking for an escape, though we know there is none. Or we can look around, see where the windows are and where doors open into the future, for the door we came through is closed. We can look for people, who can help us—and begin to attend to this life, day by day.
Slowly, and with some ambivalence, I will begin to experience the new in my life.