What comes first, goal or inspiration?
It seems to me that a wonderful idea for a direction to follow comes from both outside and inside. There were moments at the Beijing Olympics that truly inspired me to 'get out of myself' (or get off myself) and filled me with a new energy for my own training. The funny was that those moments weren't in the same field as I train in. I'm daily training for an annual 6 or 12 hour run and, as you might imagine, sometimes it takes a huge amount of motivation to get out in the morning for a two hour slog on the road. The most inspirational moments from the Beijing Olympics, for me, were in the Gymnastics - those Chinese girls on the balance beam, for one. Or when Fei Cheng pumped her fists and slapped her legs before taking off down the runway for her final vault. I was enthralled and inspired because I thought of the work those darling little things must go through to get to be tough, exquisite, superb, and all those wonderful adjectives, and I thought - hell, all I'm trying to do is keep my legs going up and down a little longer than usual! After seeing the gymnastics I realised that maybe there really is no limit to what you can do, that you are only limited to the extent of the boundaries you imagine for yourself.
There's a good free book I downloaded the other week about breaking out of the sort of thinking that limits us in all sorts of endeavours. It was good in that it told me a lot of things I had worked out myself - but it's good to read it somewhere else to confirm that a 'giving' mentality doesn't make you poor. Although it's about 'money' the principles can be used simply to widen your enjoyment of self and life and others.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Dealing with Grief
Here's a little paper or article I'm writing about grief - I've really got to get a handle on this stuff because I have to deal with so many young men who are going through grief.
ABOUT GRIEF
Getting a grip on grief, or contemplating The Phoenix (I think of overcoming grief along the lines of that mythological bird)
The professional researchers say ‘grief is healthy and natural . . .’[1] Well, perhaps we should say that ‘working through grief, or getting through grief, with the help of friends, family, and/or professional counselling, is healthy, and naturally leads to emotional growth. Of course there are many causes of grief, ranging from the death of a loved one to even vague, uncountable reasons to do with the environment in which one resides. An interesting recent finding, for example, has shown that simply visiting Las Vegas increases one’s risk of committing suicide. The most plausible explanation is that “Las Vegas’ fast growth amplifies “social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide.” [2]
I don’t have any doubts that grief is connected to suicide in that context. Suicide is the last desperate measure of grief. When we say ‘Vegas’ we naturally think of gambling, but not all the suicides in Vegas are the result of gambling addiction, as the explanation above implies: ‘social isolation, low social cohesion’, and I think those things are the most important aspects, because feelings of isolation are one of the big factors in people’s responses to grief. It is the isolation that can eventually lead to suicide. It aint healthy! Isolation is painful, distressful, overwhelming. Human beings can be terribly unsocial animals in that we can ostracize people, thoughtlessly, for no other reason than difference. We can shun people for simply appearing to be depressed, with the justification that we only want to mix with positive, out-going types. I know you know what I mean. Elements of the school playground carry into adult life – isn’t it shameful! We have to be watchful of falling back into childish conditioning.
The loss of family members or loved ones is the main cause of grief, which is also called 'bereavement'. Out of four sons I'm the only one left of my family, so I've been through the grief of losing three brothers. They left this life at different times. My first brother died at the age of ten, from leukaemia, I was almost six at the time. It has shaped my life in so many unfathomable ways. My second brother died at the age of twenty-eight, in a hut fire in a beach village in Mexico. I was 19 at the time and the tears and emptiness still reside somewhere inside me. My third brother died a couple of years ago, at the age of 52, from pancreatic cancer. I was 47 at the time. I miss him and am still trying to realise he has gone. My first wife died from burns a year after my eldest brother died from burns. I was 23 at the time and we had been together only three years.
You would think by now I would be 'hardened' to grief. It doesn't work that way. Depending on the personality it can either make you grow in compassion or the opposite - whatever that might be!
We have a certain number of emotional responses. I'm sure you have heard about the 'shock response', where your body doesn't discriminate between 'winning the lottery' or 'falling off a cliff'. A shock is a shock. And likewise, a 'loss is a loss'. Separation and/or divorce is very similar to bereavement, and in some cases is actually worse - if that is possible - because the person who has symbolically died is still alive - so there's seemingly no end to it, no closure, the devil of the thing is still there to regurgitate all those damaging emotions. The grief takes on all kinds of complications; the anger, sadness, hopelessness, depression, etc, all twist round each other, the 'normal' phases of reaction merge and live simultaneously. When someone dies the anger, the isolation, the sadness, and the final acceptance go roughly through stages, one merging to another. Not so in cases of separation or divorce - it all lingers, if not properly addressed, together, and colours one's life with a kind of angry or sour muddiness.
Okay, like most of us, I have a lot to get out of my system and onto paper - well onto the screen. So much of what is created in literature, arts and film, I'm sure, has stemmed from creators' struggle with some degree of unhealed grief. It's a great starting point in a discussion about the healing process, don't you think? How good must it be to be able to direct that enormous amount of emotional energy into something creative.
It does seem a bit much to ask though, to turn the grieving process into something creative. Certainly, it's about courage. It's about dragging something of yourself from the deepest depths, up and out through shock and the film of tears to lift your head and still be you. After the shock, alot of times comes anger. This anger can be so overwhelming, so hurtful that there ought to be protections of some sort in law for people who are going through grief. Oh boy, I'm usually a really peaceful type, sometimes a bit like a refugee from the flower-power days, but the reaction of anger I've experienced through grief could stamp me as 'Jeckyll and Hyde' personality. And I've witnessed many similar reactions - that can reappear for years, especially in separation and divorce cases.
I have related my own 'anger story' to a good friend, who has been divorced roughly the same period, and we exchange such similar, outrageous, out-of-character anger, even hatred, that it is uncanny. It is a stage in the grieving process that hardly gets a chance to move on because the 'loss' is still there, still exchanging 'life' with the kids; still on the other end of the phone line; still being mentioned in despatches and influencing other loved ones' lives. The 'anger' hasn't had a chance to mellow into sadness, for the edges to be softened and the sepia to fade the memories. There's an awful lot of energy there that keeps being fed and it needs an outlet - and if it hasn't got a creative or positive outlet to be directed into - well, it aint healthy!
There's a good website, or article, about breaking out of the doldrums and finding how to make use of your creative energy, it's called 'Re-discovering Your Creative Energy', by Laura Garrison. I'm sure she won't mind me mentioning it. It's about breaking into your hum-drum day-to-day routine by simply doing something different - to open up avenues of creativity. Well, just breaking the cycle of things is a kind of creativity.
Any natural response, like shock and grief, which can so easily lead to morbid confusion, is not necessarily healthy. But I understand the statement: it simply means that ‘to grieve is all right – to feel hopelessly sad and angry and lost and empty, even guilty and regretful, is expected. In fact if you don’t feel these things at the loss of a loved one, or the loss of something or someone you have depended on for your security, care, love, and balance of your life then there really could be something wrong with you.
I knew a fellow when I was young whose father died in the lounge room one night. This young fellow didn’t show an iota of feeling about it. In fact the day before the funeral service he went up to the cemetery to chat with the grave-digger. I tell you, real life is weirder than fiction! The father was a jolly, peaceful man, and had adored his children – his fault being rather too lax on discipline – which today would not be seen as a fault at all. The boy grew up and was a hard worker, and he kept on being sent to prison for stupid things: fights, car-stealing, damaging property, that sort of thing. Call me a softy, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps that poor fellow never quite got to acceptance of his father’s passing, and even the trip to the graveyard didn’t answer his deep, awful questions: something along the lines of “Have you really gone, Da?” Hm?
So, grief is healthy only if we get to the other side of it. We all need a bit of help to get there too. Getting there doesn’t simply happen either. You don’t wake up one day and find yourself over it. In fact in many cases it never quite leaves; those autumn leaves float to the ground every damned year; a short, blonde girl will always turn up one of those smiles, that particular look to send you down melancholic avenues of memory; people will forget to phone, or, sometimes worse, they’ll remember on that special day. The sort of help we need sometimes is not anything to do with ‘clinical counseling’, or anything like ‘counseling’, but simply friendship, the sort of friendship that shares all the vagaries of living.
It’s not healthy to feel you are in a situation where you cannot express your feelings. The fire to burn away the dross of pain and loss cannot be fanned if you can’t feed it. We are complex entities, with subtleties of realities about ourselves. The sun’s actual atmosphere encircles a sphere far beyond the earth’s orbit. The world actually spins around within the sun’s atmosphere. We too move about within the orbits of other people; we are constantly influencing and being influenced by other people, the closest and dearest almost as near as being part of our very flesh and bone. If Venus, for example, suddenly span out of the solar system, the repercussions would be horrific, the disturbances in our rotation would probably cause the extinction of much of the animal life on the planet. Solar flares would leap out, the sun would shift dramatically. The same when a loved one suddenly leaves our orbit it rents a chunk out of our finer selves. Many, many people are drastically disturbed as the repercussions wash through all the orbits.
The adrenal glands don’t know the difference between the starter’s gun of your Olympic final’s race or the crack of enemy fire. Deeply felt loss, of whatever loss, causes similiar reactions within us - it sends us spinning out of orbit, out of equilibrium. We search to find it back again, naturally, grappling at the space that no longer supports us, trying to find the answer.
We are incredibly ingenious creatures, when you think of how we have developed the concept of ‘faith’, the concept of ‘spiritual life’, the concept of ‘the other side’. But nothing comes from nothing. An idea cannot be formed without there being the reality of it. The idea of ‘rising above the physical, animal plane’, for instance, is an amazing proof that human beings really are ‘out of this world’, figuratively and literally. As the poet, Alexander Pope, implies in his ‘Study of Mankind’, man is “Twixt heaven and hell . . . made half to rise, half to fall”, we are, in the main, a kind of wonder of glorious, spiritual dimensions in the waiting, of such brilliant and gossamer subtlety, that we will fly between worlds at the speed of thought – that’s what we are, what we are to become when freed of this muddy cocoon. It is true. Words cannot do justice to the wonder of what we truly are. It is true as the words have been written; the thought, the concept or the idea have not come from nothing.
Grief is an emotional wound, and can be an incessant, prolonged weeping wound. We are told that eventually acceptance will come. So we try to take the hurt in and make it part of us. We try to accept all the feelings as part of our being, which it is, to some extent, as no one else can wear our feeling. The process of acceptance is the healing scab, a new skin forming over the shredded body, perhaps even a new inner body breathing in life anew. Acceptance is not a magic trick, not simply a thing that can be short-tracked through hypnosis. Acceptance can take many years for its realisation, for an enormous space has to be adjusted for, in fact another life has to be germinated, nurtured and grown, and that life has to learn again to follow the streams, the eddies, the rises and falls, just like second nature.
Acceptance is about loving or knowing yourself as a wonderful being who can be insightful, who can be inspired, can feel joy and sorrow, who can touch and be touched by beauty, by innocence, by achievement and by tragedy. It's not about being able to step outside yourself to view things objectively - a handy trick in some instances - but about being able to appreciate all things and letting yourself feel in wholeness. The pheonix rises from the ashes anew and it's pure tears of emotion can heal the deepest wounds. Now, with acceptance, the letting of emotion is healthy.
[1] King, M.D. Steven A. ‘Grief’ Your Total Health 2008; p.1.
[2] Marshall Allen, ‘Being in Vegas raises the risk of suicide’ The Vegas Sun, December10, 2008
ABOUT GRIEF
Getting a grip on grief, or contemplating The Phoenix (I think of overcoming grief along the lines of that mythological bird)
The professional researchers say ‘grief is healthy and natural . . .’[1] Well, perhaps we should say that ‘working through grief, or getting through grief, with the help of friends, family, and/or professional counselling, is healthy, and naturally leads to emotional growth. Of course there are many causes of grief, ranging from the death of a loved one to even vague, uncountable reasons to do with the environment in which one resides. An interesting recent finding, for example, has shown that simply visiting Las Vegas increases one’s risk of committing suicide. The most plausible explanation is that “Las Vegas’ fast growth amplifies “social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide.” [2]
I don’t have any doubts that grief is connected to suicide in that context. Suicide is the last desperate measure of grief. When we say ‘Vegas’ we naturally think of gambling, but not all the suicides in Vegas are the result of gambling addiction, as the explanation above implies: ‘social isolation, low social cohesion’, and I think those things are the most important aspects, because feelings of isolation are one of the big factors in people’s responses to grief. It is the isolation that can eventually lead to suicide. It aint healthy! Isolation is painful, distressful, overwhelming. Human beings can be terribly unsocial animals in that we can ostracize people, thoughtlessly, for no other reason than difference. We can shun people for simply appearing to be depressed, with the justification that we only want to mix with positive, out-going types. I know you know what I mean. Elements of the school playground carry into adult life – isn’t it shameful! We have to be watchful of falling back into childish conditioning.
The loss of family members or loved ones is the main cause of grief, which is also called 'bereavement'. Out of four sons I'm the only one left of my family, so I've been through the grief of losing three brothers. They left this life at different times. My first brother died at the age of ten, from leukaemia, I was almost six at the time. It has shaped my life in so many unfathomable ways. My second brother died at the age of twenty-eight, in a hut fire in a beach village in Mexico. I was 19 at the time and the tears and emptiness still reside somewhere inside me. My third brother died a couple of years ago, at the age of 52, from pancreatic cancer. I was 47 at the time. I miss him and am still trying to realise he has gone. My first wife died from burns a year after my eldest brother died from burns. I was 23 at the time and we had been together only three years.
You would think by now I would be 'hardened' to grief. It doesn't work that way. Depending on the personality it can either make you grow in compassion or the opposite - whatever that might be!
We have a certain number of emotional responses. I'm sure you have heard about the 'shock response', where your body doesn't discriminate between 'winning the lottery' or 'falling off a cliff'. A shock is a shock. And likewise, a 'loss is a loss'. Separation and/or divorce is very similar to bereavement, and in some cases is actually worse - if that is possible - because the person who has symbolically died is still alive - so there's seemingly no end to it, no closure, the devil of the thing is still there to regurgitate all those damaging emotions. The grief takes on all kinds of complications; the anger, sadness, hopelessness, depression, etc, all twist round each other, the 'normal' phases of reaction merge and live simultaneously. When someone dies the anger, the isolation, the sadness, and the final acceptance go roughly through stages, one merging to another. Not so in cases of separation or divorce - it all lingers, if not properly addressed, together, and colours one's life with a kind of angry or sour muddiness.
Okay, like most of us, I have a lot to get out of my system and onto paper - well onto the screen. So much of what is created in literature, arts and film, I'm sure, has stemmed from creators' struggle with some degree of unhealed grief. It's a great starting point in a discussion about the healing process, don't you think? How good must it be to be able to direct that enormous amount of emotional energy into something creative.
It does seem a bit much to ask though, to turn the grieving process into something creative. Certainly, it's about courage. It's about dragging something of yourself from the deepest depths, up and out through shock and the film of tears to lift your head and still be you. After the shock, alot of times comes anger. This anger can be so overwhelming, so hurtful that there ought to be protections of some sort in law for people who are going through grief. Oh boy, I'm usually a really peaceful type, sometimes a bit like a refugee from the flower-power days, but the reaction of anger I've experienced through grief could stamp me as 'Jeckyll and Hyde' personality. And I've witnessed many similar reactions - that can reappear for years, especially in separation and divorce cases.
I have related my own 'anger story' to a good friend, who has been divorced roughly the same period, and we exchange such similar, outrageous, out-of-character anger, even hatred, that it is uncanny. It is a stage in the grieving process that hardly gets a chance to move on because the 'loss' is still there, still exchanging 'life' with the kids; still on the other end of the phone line; still being mentioned in despatches and influencing other loved ones' lives. The 'anger' hasn't had a chance to mellow into sadness, for the edges to be softened and the sepia to fade the memories. There's an awful lot of energy there that keeps being fed and it needs an outlet - and if it hasn't got a creative or positive outlet to be directed into - well, it aint healthy!
There's a good website, or article, about breaking out of the doldrums and finding how to make use of your creative energy, it's called 'Re-discovering Your Creative Energy', by Laura Garrison. I'm sure she won't mind me mentioning it. It's about breaking into your hum-drum day-to-day routine by simply doing something different - to open up avenues of creativity. Well, just breaking the cycle of things is a kind of creativity.
Any natural response, like shock and grief, which can so easily lead to morbid confusion, is not necessarily healthy. But I understand the statement: it simply means that ‘to grieve is all right – to feel hopelessly sad and angry and lost and empty, even guilty and regretful, is expected. In fact if you don’t feel these things at the loss of a loved one, or the loss of something or someone you have depended on for your security, care, love, and balance of your life then there really could be something wrong with you.
I knew a fellow when I was young whose father died in the lounge room one night. This young fellow didn’t show an iota of feeling about it. In fact the day before the funeral service he went up to the cemetery to chat with the grave-digger. I tell you, real life is weirder than fiction! The father was a jolly, peaceful man, and had adored his children – his fault being rather too lax on discipline – which today would not be seen as a fault at all. The boy grew up and was a hard worker, and he kept on being sent to prison for stupid things: fights, car-stealing, damaging property, that sort of thing. Call me a softy, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps that poor fellow never quite got to acceptance of his father’s passing, and even the trip to the graveyard didn’t answer his deep, awful questions: something along the lines of “Have you really gone, Da?” Hm?
So, grief is healthy only if we get to the other side of it. We all need a bit of help to get there too. Getting there doesn’t simply happen either. You don’t wake up one day and find yourself over it. In fact in many cases it never quite leaves; those autumn leaves float to the ground every damned year; a short, blonde girl will always turn up one of those smiles, that particular look to send you down melancholic avenues of memory; people will forget to phone, or, sometimes worse, they’ll remember on that special day. The sort of help we need sometimes is not anything to do with ‘clinical counseling’, or anything like ‘counseling’, but simply friendship, the sort of friendship that shares all the vagaries of living.
It’s not healthy to feel you are in a situation where you cannot express your feelings. The fire to burn away the dross of pain and loss cannot be fanned if you can’t feed it. We are complex entities, with subtleties of realities about ourselves. The sun’s actual atmosphere encircles a sphere far beyond the earth’s orbit. The world actually spins around within the sun’s atmosphere. We too move about within the orbits of other people; we are constantly influencing and being influenced by other people, the closest and dearest almost as near as being part of our very flesh and bone. If Venus, for example, suddenly span out of the solar system, the repercussions would be horrific, the disturbances in our rotation would probably cause the extinction of much of the animal life on the planet. Solar flares would leap out, the sun would shift dramatically. The same when a loved one suddenly leaves our orbit it rents a chunk out of our finer selves. Many, many people are drastically disturbed as the repercussions wash through all the orbits.
The adrenal glands don’t know the difference between the starter’s gun of your Olympic final’s race or the crack of enemy fire. Deeply felt loss, of whatever loss, causes similiar reactions within us - it sends us spinning out of orbit, out of equilibrium. We search to find it back again, naturally, grappling at the space that no longer supports us, trying to find the answer.
We are incredibly ingenious creatures, when you think of how we have developed the concept of ‘faith’, the concept of ‘spiritual life’, the concept of ‘the other side’. But nothing comes from nothing. An idea cannot be formed without there being the reality of it. The idea of ‘rising above the physical, animal plane’, for instance, is an amazing proof that human beings really are ‘out of this world’, figuratively and literally. As the poet, Alexander Pope, implies in his ‘Study of Mankind’, man is “Twixt heaven and hell . . . made half to rise, half to fall”, we are, in the main, a kind of wonder of glorious, spiritual dimensions in the waiting, of such brilliant and gossamer subtlety, that we will fly between worlds at the speed of thought – that’s what we are, what we are to become when freed of this muddy cocoon. It is true. Words cannot do justice to the wonder of what we truly are. It is true as the words have been written; the thought, the concept or the idea have not come from nothing.
Grief is an emotional wound, and can be an incessant, prolonged weeping wound. We are told that eventually acceptance will come. So we try to take the hurt in and make it part of us. We try to accept all the feelings as part of our being, which it is, to some extent, as no one else can wear our feeling. The process of acceptance is the healing scab, a new skin forming over the shredded body, perhaps even a new inner body breathing in life anew. Acceptance is not a magic trick, not simply a thing that can be short-tracked through hypnosis. Acceptance can take many years for its realisation, for an enormous space has to be adjusted for, in fact another life has to be germinated, nurtured and grown, and that life has to learn again to follow the streams, the eddies, the rises and falls, just like second nature.
Acceptance is about loving or knowing yourself as a wonderful being who can be insightful, who can be inspired, can feel joy and sorrow, who can touch and be touched by beauty, by innocence, by achievement and by tragedy. It's not about being able to step outside yourself to view things objectively - a handy trick in some instances - but about being able to appreciate all things and letting yourself feel in wholeness. The pheonix rises from the ashes anew and it's pure tears of emotion can heal the deepest wounds. Now, with acceptance, the letting of emotion is healthy.
[1] King, M.D. Steven A. ‘Grief’ Your Total Health 2008; p.1.
[2] Marshall Allen, ‘Being in Vegas raises the risk of suicide’ The Vegas Sun, December10, 2008
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