Thought for the day, 4 November 2021

One of things you learn as you get older - because you have to learn it, if you want to stay intact - is how to grieve.

To be fair, I say this as someone who hasn't yet fully mastered it.  Mostly, the things I've grieved over have been small.  When it comes to the hardest losses a person can face, I've somehow dodged a bullet.

And so I feel conflicted, sitting here in a ring of cake crumbs and self-pity, thinking about Kōwhai.  People say grief is subjective - if it hurts then it hurts, whether the cause is big or small.  I can't say.  I just know, I've sat with people who've lost children.  I have nothing to offer that compares. 

But whether big or small, you learn to do grief.  Even at first, when you can't pull yourself out of the immediacy of the pain, experience tells you that one day, little by little, you will.  You've done this before. 

And at the end of it, after you've made peace, there's a kind of sweetness.  That point where you can smile as you remember the quirks and the laughs.  In that early time, you want so much to fast forward the journey from here to there.  But you can't.  That journey, with all of its hard steps, is how the sweetness is earned.

If you want to hang out here, and sit a little while with whatever you're carrying - kind of like you would on an unpainted park bench in a scruffy garden - then I invite you to.

While you're here, this is a picture of my late dick of cat, asleep and hugging my running shoe on my 90s carpet.