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 pains of forging a new way forward. Restoration is where we reorganize ourselves, our lives, and our worldview to incorporate a reality without the thing we lost.

This model asserts that early in "healthy" grief, we oscillate between the two orientations at a high frequency. Over time, the pendulum slows and we spend more time in the middle, the present, the reality of day to day life, but always with the possibility of swinging to the sides now and then.

I think about this as I look at 2022 on the horizon. I think of all the changes we've incorporated since March 2020. I think of all the people we lost, of the widening schisms between the world as we believed it to be and the world as it is. I think of restoration and growing pains as we rebuild our lives, our jobs, our entire societies around this new reality we face. A reality with something missing. Something big.

With what will we fill it? And when will the pendulum begin to slow?