Grieving The New Year
As we barrel towards the end of another largely disappointing year in history, I've been seeing quite a few posts about grief. It's likely that, if you're a human being right now, you've been experiencing grief in one way or another over the past 2 years. Maybe it's not a death you're grieving. Maybe it's some other loss, like your entire sense of normalcy and safety. We humans have a unique ability to grieve both physical and spiritual losses. We grieve the tangible and the philosophical. We grieve what was and what could have been. Much of my grief has been spiritual. I grieve plans, identities, connections, and ideologies. I grieve for potentials: mine and others. There is a theory in the grief world called the Dual Process Model which describes grief as a pendulum swinging between two paradigms: Loss orientation and restoration orientation. In the loss orientation, we yearn for what was and what could have been; in restoration we experience the growing