@talljasperman: “How do you learn how to deal with loss in an imperfect world?”
I’ve had many struggles with loss for most of my life. I’ve only really started to investigate it in the past few years. What I discovered is that loss is just the result of the fact that everything changes. And this can be a liberating realization. It means that the good and the bad is merely temporary.
I would see photos of my kids and feel deep pain because that person was no longer there, and I would feel that I had somehow failed to hold on to that moment or truly appreciate it. Of course, the real crime was that all of this regret was occurring while I was unaware of yet another “present” as it passed. I became almost desperate to try to grab onto the present, that I would regret the loss of a moment that was happening now. Yes, it was pretty screwed up.
But what I realized was that most of the activity of regret and clinging to the past and ideas of loss were fantasy. We are constantly changing, yet we project our current “self” into a simulated past and mix it with emotions from the present. It’s like a dream in many ways. And the more I look back with regret and feelings of loss, the fantasy/memory must be re-assembled, with more mutations and other random variables being introduced. And all of this is happening in the present. And guess what else is happening in the present? The present. So, engaging in regret about loss is a way of choosing to generate fantasies while giving up the present – an activity that will likely also cause more regret and feelings of loss.
So, what am I talking about really? It seems to me that there a couple of types of loss. There is real, intense, painful loss that is the result of traumatic life experiences (loss of a loved one, loss of health, etc). And there is just the loss we experience due to change. In my experience, the latter is so common that it makes the former so much more challenging to accept. I’m finding that if I can accept that if change-related loss is merely the birth of something new, then more traumatic loss seems more understandable. In some ways, it’s just more change. What I thought I had to lose wasn’t mine to begin with, and what I think was me to lose it is more of a concept to begin with, and the thing “I” lost is again something that only makes sense in a very limited conceptual sense.
@talljasperman: “How can you learn to make the big decisions?”
Yikes. I have no idea. My life can best be described as a long series of bad decisions – except for all of the good ones. :) Seriously, though, I don’t think we can truly evaluate the efficacy or even results of decisions we make. Again, we often make an evaluation about a decision we made in the past by plugging in variables about our life that would not have been valid for it not for the decisions we made.
