A Quick Note on Grief
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” – Francis Weller
If you just skimmed the quote above, go back and read it again with focus and attention. Let each word register.
I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately. 2020 brought so much to mourn. Though it’s not just 2020, or even the last four years. As I grow older I’ve become more acquainted with my wounds, my traumas, and the pain of the world around me. Obviously social media and ubiquitous access to information has made all of this more accessible, closer, and unceasing. But as I reflect on the events of yesterday at the capitol and the general milieu of our country I can’t help but think that a sense of loss is the primary force behind it all. Yet we’re so adverse to mourning. To feeling negative emotion. To the discomfort of warm tears and hot anger. The feral nature of grief is taboo, unsanctioned, as Francis Weller says. Because of this, Weller says we live either in a state of amnesia – working to forget the pains of our past and present, or a state of anesthesia – constantly seeking ways to numb and cope. I’ve come to believe that unless we shake ourselves out of our amnesia or our anesthesia and come to accept our grief, we will not heal. We will not be able to imagine a different world. We will not be equipped to empathize, to embrace and celebrate the other. We will remain socially and culturally stunted and stratified. In a culture so enthralled by ascent, we need to accept what many wisdom traditions have known for millennia – progress often looks like descent. The valleys of life are as sacred as the mountain tops.
I’ve also been thinking about the role of grief in creativity. For those of us whose careers are built around what could be, we will always live with a sense of incompleteness, of loss, of unrealized opportunity and potential. There will always be a lack as Peter Rollins often says in his recounting of the work of Jacques Lacan. Discontentment. Unfulfillment. I’m here to tell you that is ok. Your unrealized aspirations, opportunities, and potential are worth grieving. I’ve also come to believe in that place of sorrow is your brilliance. Again quoting Weller, your “outcasts are your outposts.” Those ideas, hunches, and emotions that have been disregarded, shunned, and excluded are actually the outposts from which the frontier of the future can and should be explored and mapped. We need to deconstruct the toxic optimism that plagues our organizations and allow grief the room to do its work. If we do, we’ll be better innovators, and more importantly, healthier humans.
-Joel