The Other Side of Empty

As winter nears, with its darker and shorter days, the loss of family as the Holidays near sometimes feels like hollow steps inside the ache in my soul. There was a time when I tried to tune that loss and its emptiness out, but I recently decided to embrace it, to accept it. Acceptance is a strange thing when it comes to the pain of loss. It somehow sets you free to stop running away from it, to yell at it and chase it off, so to speak. I decided to invite it in, to try and walk to the other side of that dark pathway and accept the shivers and cobwebs along the way. And a funny thing is starting to happen: I feel more at ease. The perfectionist in me wants to understand everything, square it away neatly, define it exactly, the why and how. But maybe our lives are more like watercolors than oils. Maybe there is room for vagueness, for the unknown, the incomprehensible, the absurd, since it is hard to see the entire picture all the time, when everyone around us only shows us half a picture, at best. So maybe uncertainty is acceptable, even in those of us whose dreams were shattered like so many shards of a vase, and we are left to put the pieces back together, and we realize that in spite of our best efforts, and therapy, and rationalization, and time, we end up with a vase put back together with quite a few rough edges, askew, and pieces missing like a surrealist's interpretation on sculpture. It's all right, because when you step two steps outside your door, imperfection is all around you, and there is great love and beauty in its courage to just keep going anyway. Order is a relative thing, and a bit of chaos and uncertainty can free the mind to see beyond the obvious, to approach our own dreams and those of others with a bit more tolerance, a bit more kindness. On the other side of empty I am trying to meet a wiser, smarter, more generous self. I think it may the the start of a beautiful friendship.