Loss and Gain
artwork by Tu-2, “untethered”
The weather is wet, grey, and cool in the early morning. The temperature sits at 55 degrees fahrenheit. It feels like a good rinse.
Things are happening exactly how we all were told would be happening - a lot of change. For many, it feels like chaos. And it is. The country is absorbing the kind of movement that comes when change is beyond whatever we were prepared for with the shift in leadership roles and ideas.
The loss of an election means the gain in an opportunity to stretch our capacities and refine our sense of timing as to when things will open up for the loss to be turned into a gain. Of course, it is a point of view in describing things as “loss” because for many, many, many other people are experiencing the shift as a “gain” and it is a time for jubilation. Others feel untethered and lost in space.
How about this as a lens? We have gained an opportunity to break things that were already broken beyond repair, and we have gained a chance to re-imagine what can emerge from the rubble that came with apathy, cynicism, and fear. Many people have stopped listening to, or reading about the public pronouncements that is called “the news” and many are scrambling to meet the new (momentary) reality. This is entirely understandable. And it is important to remember that change is the exciting part — it sits between loss and gain. Why allow your small part of the big picture to be ruined or discombobulated in the midst of the shifts?
Just go about your daily business of meeting the needs of your body and spirit (eat and sleep). And if you are graced with the privilege of not having to dig out of the impact of any number of tragedies that have befallen people across the nation - consider yourself blessed and make sure that you consciously move into a place of deep gratitude for having the privilege of availability to help others.
Staying connected to the events of the day is important. For many, it is painful in these times, but it is important to allow pain to enter your life if your experience is only reading about it, and not having to live it through stories in the pod-world or second-hand stories from friends of friends, or family members who live in another place. You are blessed to be able to take the losses and turn them into the gains of extending support through your loving gestures of making time, donating things needed, transporting people who need to move (sometimes quickly) to another destination. So many ways the loss can be transformed into a form of gain.
Yes, this is a dualistic way of seeing things; and there are times when the duality is useful. For example, as a way to stay in the light of love and care; and to prevent moving into doubt and despair. Both exist and both are happening now. We, most of us anyway, tend to be in duality anyway — the work of living into wisdom is to realize there is no way to escape the truth of our co-existence, our oneness, and our common destiny.
Losses and gains happen. It is the experience of life. No one lives entirely in one or the other, even if bombs and explosions are happening all around - human beings find things ways to survive thanks to faith, caring, belonging to something more than self.
The certainty of things in living in this world is not limited to death and taxes, but it is the experience of knowing there is “the next thing” … whatever that may be - and those of us who stay in the light, will be there to experience it, or to make it happen.