Surprised...

Surprised...

I've been thinking about grief lately.

Several weeks back a friend said 'I think you're still grieving.' My first reaction was, 'No. Can't be. Life is better. I don't miss the way it was.'

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my friend was right, and that it is sneaking up and biting me in backside when I wasn't looking.

That's not to say I miss the way it was. I don't. But even though I really like my new house, and many of the other aspects of being single, this wasn't in my life's master plan.

Last year I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Eckhard Tolle's 'The Power of Now'. One of the things he says that I find both profound and idiotic at the same time is something to the effect of "All human pain is caused by refusing to accept reality as it really and truly is." (I don't have the book in front of me as I write this, so if there is an expert out there who thinks I'm miss-quoting or misinterpreting him, let me know. It's been 15 months since I read the book.) It is profound because if is true. It is idiotic because he goes on to say that all we need to do to eliminate pain from our lives is to accept our reality. And we can all do it in the blink of an eye.

Maybe when I'm a lot older I'll see things differently. But it seems to me that part of being human is that we plan and dream and imagine what our lives are. And we work actively and consciously - some of us maybe more than others - to make them happen. And then shit happens. Something surprises us. Maybe our spouse or child dies, or we end up divorced or bankrupt or flooded out or clobbered by a drunk driver when we're biking across New York State, or any number of things. Shit happens.

To say we can eliminate that pain in our lives by simply accepting our new reality is balogna. It may be true, but it doesn't happen in the blink of an eye, or over night or even, for some of us, in a lifetime.

All this isn't to say that I'm walking around with my chin on my chest. I'm not. I feel great and I love my life. But at some level, I'm still surprised.