289: Losing It

What if we could hold gratitude and sorrow together in us, rather than reducing ourselves to only one or the other, and rather than tuning out of life so as to avoid losing things? What might it be to honour and experience the gratitude that is inside all sorrow, and the sorrow that is inside all gladness, and in so-doing come to honour the exquisite and extraordinary depth and inner multiplicity of being a human being?



This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.



(the audio of Justin's voice this week is not the usual recording quality we'd hope for... we'll be back to our usual clarity next week) 



Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.



Here’s our source for this week:



Losing It



This morning, after swimming, I overhear a conversation between two men who are sitting by the water. One has lost his sunglasses on an earlier swim and is quite distressed.



‘They were expensive. Armani.’ he says. ‘I paid a lot of money for them. And they are the third pair I’ve lost this summer’.



He is too agitated to be present with his friend who, after some minutes of listening, says ‘You seem really shaken up by this, too shaken up even to really be interested that I’m here with you. You’re saying the same thing, over and over again. But,’ and here he pauses, ‘tell me something. Did you enjoy having them? Did they bring you pleasure? Because although you’ve now lost them, for a while you did have them too’.



For a while, you did have them. And having them, while it lasted, was a gift.

And at that moment it occurs to me that this is true for everything, and for all of us. We wail and fret about what we lose, and rightly, because our loss is so often a source of suffering for us. But we will all lose our sunglasses, eventually, just as we will lose all our possessions, our friendships, our bodies, and everything we know.

And because losing is terrible and difficult to bear, we can spend our lives fretting about what’s yet to lose, and clinging madly to it, or becoming consumed with longing or remorse for what we’ve lost.



And all the while forgetting that, for a time, we did have all of this, and missing the wonder that there is anything at all – sunglasses, friendships, work, life – worth having enough that its loss matters to us in the first place.



Justin Wise

justinwise.co.uk



Photo by Sergey Chuprin on Unsplash