Loss and Transformation

When we talk about aging, we often hear and, or use the word loss.  Sometimes it is a big loss - a spouse, child, or a serious debilitating change of health.

But, for many of us, as we live longer into each decade, it is not the big losses, it is the slow accumulation of small changes:

• Energy shifts and changes because of changes in health and vision, hearing, mobility, illness

• Loss of a role you once had that gave meaning

• -Leaving your long time home and moving into community living

• Friends moving away

• Extended family dynamics shift

• Or perhaps, you feel a sense of loss about the future or lost opportunities, dreams you once held as possible.

Change is a process.  Loss an event.  IN loss something disappears; in change things unfold…there is an eventual transition into a different way of life; a different kind of life…

In walking the path of loss, you learn to restructure reality

I used to hold onto my losses more tightly. Perhaps I believed they earned some badge of honor in the storyline of my life. They became part of my identity, evidence of what I had endured.

But recently, I experienced a loss that challenged my ability to transform it into a new reality. For a time, I found myself resisting the transition. I wanted to hold onto what had been rather than accept what now was.

So instead of allowing my psyche to cling to this loss and add it to all the others—as though they were one big family of company, I became determined to shift my perspective. I wanted to transform it rather than carry it. This took dedicated meditation and internal inquiry and processing. I was able to transform my feelings of loss into peace. I no longer experienced it as something that happened to me, but rather,

that invited something from me.

Losses can have a way of lingering. They follow us around like the dust cloud that trailed Pig-Pen in Charlie Brown. They attach themselves to our stories and settle into the corners of our minds. If we’re not careful, they can accumulate until they occupy more space than they deserve

I have been shedding more losses to the wind lately. Not forgetting them. Not denying them. But releasing their hold on me. Freeing up the attic of my mind so that I have room to create, adapt, and continue becoming.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet tasks of aging—not to avoid loss, but to continually transform it into a new reality, one that allows us to remain fully engaged with life as it is now.