I was told by some of our Neufeld Institute staff that our newsletter subscribers might appreciate hearing from me at the start of this new year. I usually turtle during the winter holidays, retreating to my family and my reading and generally closing the shutters to the outside world. It isn’t that there aren’t thoughts swirling in my head. That never ends, but making sense of them, never mind finding the words to describe them, is a whole different story. Nevertheless, I shall try to capture some reflections … actually two streams of consciousness … that strangely converge into yet another advocacy of sadness. When I called my daughter Tamara to express my concern that yet another melancholic offering was not what people might appreciate on New Years, she encouraged me to proceed nevertheless. So here goes.
One set of ruminations stemmed from a spectacular failure of attachment that happened just before the winter holidays. A proud big old birch tree that we had become neighbours to some 36 years ago, was uprooted. In its fall, it downed significant sections of the fences that have stood guard to our yard and home for all these years. This mature, healthy birch should have been able to hold on, but its attachment to the earth had become weakened by a thorough drenching from an atmospheric river, to the point where an unusual gust of wind upended it. The examining experts and insurance agents suspected that climate change had created the perfect storm for this noble tree.
If the birch’s loss of attachment to the earth that supported it is indeed an end result of our failure to take care of the earth, then it would also be the domino effect of our own loss of attachment to this earth. Since we are only inclined to take care of who and what we are attached to, the ultimate result of this failure of attachment is tragic if not catastrophic, as we are witnessing today in so many ways.
The second experience I found myself ruminating on was witnessing a series of New Year’s celebrations from across Canada on CBC (our national broadcasting system). What caught my attention most was the nature of the wishes and resolutions of the people being interviewed. For the most part, they were variations on the theme of wanting to put the problems of the past behind and hoping for things to get better.
What struck me was the fact that our desperate push for progress, both individually and societally, may actually be sabotaging the very process by which we might get there. The ancient Greeks – at least the wise ones – had this idea that a tragedy would continue to take its toll unless, or until, it was sufficiently grieved. This premise certainly fits with everything I know as a theorist and as a therapist, as well as what I have observed in my own life, in our family, and in the surrounding community.
If this be true and I believe it is, then perhaps it would be more productive if this annual rite of the passage of time had us pausing to grieve what was missing or lacking in the previous year, especially where attachments had failed to provide the rest we so deeply yearn for. In fact, isn’t it the very lack of grieving these attachment failures and shortcomings that has created the relentless restlessness that fuels the nature-destroying isms – materialism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism – as well as the soul-destroying afflictions so common today? In fact, it seems to me that our current crisis of well-being could itself be traced, not just to the failure of restful attachments, but more accurately to our failure to grieve these lacks and losses. I do wonder if we would not have more success in turning things around if we used this time to let our tears catch up with us instead of resolving ourselves to trying harder to escape our past.
Apropos, but on a much lighter note, it came to me that I may have some unfinished business to do with regards to this uprooted birch tree. It appears that the fallen birch was not the last domino to fall. As I had reported above, the failure of its attachment roots destabilized sections of our fences as well. This in turn undermined the support of a driveway gate that I had carefully crafted out of cedar when our boys were young. Its sole job was to keep our active youngsters from chasing their balls and pets into the busy city street in front of our house. When its service was no longer needed, it became a stationary accessory to the driveway. Given that it was no longer rolling, moss gathered onto it (who knew that cedar gates were similar to rolling stones in this way), turning it into a beautiful – to me, at least – natural work of art that unexpectedly worked itself into my heart. I reinforced it structurally from time to time, being careful not to disturb this fragile evolving marriage of cedar and moss. I still used it as a navigational aid for backing out of the driveway, but took great care to make sure that nothing threatened its motionless stability.
In other words, the birch’s failed attachments further threatened my attachment, however trite, to this moss and cedar fusion which I have come to enjoy. Given my reticence to let it go, I suspected that I needed to take a moment to grieve the inevitable loss. Relatively speaking, it is an almost incidental and certainly infinitesimal grief – a small trickle of melancholy – that leads, however, into more significant tributaries of tears … that in turn become rivers of sorrow … that empty into seas of sadness where our individual and corporate transformation lies. Perhaps grief too has a domino effect, but in reverse. It gives us our life back without it needing to get better. And sometimes we may need to start with the small griefs.
And so it seems that we may not need a better life; we may need to become better at living. Surprisingly and certainly paradoxically, this will only happen when we become better at grieving.
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a trilogy of New Year’s editorials by Gordon that riff on the construct of happiness. We invite you to see Gordon’s previous New Year’s editorials: “Tis the Season for Sad Music” and “Endless Beginnings” for more.