Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. 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.
–Francis Weller
It was expected, but that didn’t make it easier. I was in a client meeting when I received the call. My grandfather had died that morning from prostate cancer. He died peacefully with his kids around him. We had planned for this, so his passing wasn’t entirely unexpected; I compartmentalized the news and went on with my meeting.
A few weeks later my wife received a similar call. One of her sisters had lost her short but aggressive fight with breast cancer, leaving her husband and three kids. We were devastated. I again compartmentalized the news – there was no space in life to sit with loss.
A couple weeks after that was my grandfather’s funeral. I had yet to fully process his death, and as his funeral approached, I began to reflect on all that he had meant to me. In the last few years of his life, we had become very close. My grandfather was a voracious lifelong learner and a part of the early Linux movement. I have such amazing memories of him – from showing me a program he wrote to model the growth of bacteria, to helping NASA with a decentralized computing experiment in the early days of the internet. He was a photographer, a natural food evangelist (far before it was the norm), he loved riding motorcycles, and he seemingly knew everything about 20th century history and geopolitics. He was one of the few people who I felt could really see me.
As the family gathered, my emotions swelled. The loss of both my grandfather and my sister-in-law flipped my override switch. I stepped outside and sobbed until my face ached.
Yet there was more sorrow to come. A month later we lost another sister – Chelsa – to cancer. She had been fighting multiple myeloma for seven years. Complications from the disease had led to an aneurism; I had been at the hospital when the doctor told us there was nothing else he could do. I had to call my wife and ask her to come say goodbye. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Chelsa died, surrounded by family, on May 23rd, 2018. We had lost three of our closest family in as many months.
Through these months I encountered a human experience previously unknown to me. Sorrow, characterized by uncontrollable and unimaginable ache. This was my initiation into grief and my apprenticeship with sorrow began. The flood gates opened to new emotions, new thoughts, and a new lens through which to see the pain of the world.
Since then, I have learned more about what it means to be human, to love, to create, and belong from grief than any other experience, emotion, and state of being. More than anything, grief has brought into crystal clear focus what matters. It has changed my experience of the temporal, of what here and now actually means. Rilke put this sentiment plainly when he said. “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”
Someone loved and lost. This is an ache many of us are familiar with. This loss is what the psychotherapist and grief counselor Francis Weller calls ‘the first gate of grief.’ Having walked through this gate I found I was equipped – in some way that had not been before – to see grief all around me. There are more gates. More grief.
The second gate of grief is for the sorrows of the world. The pandemic amplified much of this grief – the grief of systemic ‘othering’ and racism. Social fragmentation. Climate change, biodiversity loss, ecocide, and extinction. Wars of oppression and gun violence. Mental health crisis among youth and suicide. Political turmoil perpetuated by nationalism and authoritarianism. Economic stratification. There is much to mourn in the world today, and mourn we do whether we know it or not. The reality is that we are inundated ceaselessly with media about this crisis in all its various expressions and dimensions. These messages compete with each other, each subsequent news cycle seemingly shouting louder and louder. While not as acutely sharp as the loss of a loved one, the sorrow innate in the suffering we read about daily slowly takes up residence in our psyche, seeping into our bodies.
So we numb, seeking the anesthesia that can free us from the burden. We distract ourselves with almost infinite choices in entertainment, spending hours scrolling and streaming. The implications of this are detrimental, namely that we are “coping ourselves to death.” My friend Freya said that “for the majority of us, the self we think we are is actually a coping self, not an authentic self.” The devastating implication of this is for the majority of us, we are existing as shells of our actual authentic selves, perpetuating unhealthy systems that feed on our inability to live with the “cascading collective trauma” of modern life.
In his phenomenal book ‘The Myth of Normal,’ Gabor Mate puts it this way –
Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present. In an absurd twist, we save up to buy the latest "time-saving" devices, the better to "kill" time. Awareness of the moment has become something to fear. Late-stage capitalism is expert in catering to this sense of present-moment dread—in fact, much of its success depends on the chasm between us and the present, our greatest gift, getting ever wider, the false products and artificial distractions of consumer culture designed to fill in the gap.
What is lost is well described by the Polish-born writer Eva Hoffman as "nothing more or less than the experience of experience itself. And what is that? Perhaps something like the capacity to enter into the textures or sensations of the moment; to relax enough so as to give oneself over to the rhythms of an episode or a personal encounter, to follow the thread of feeling or thought without knowing where it leads, or to pause long enough for reflection or contemplation." Ultimately, what we are distracted from is living.
Grieving, I have found, liberates us from this state of distraction, it forces us to be in the present. Hot tears scream “this! now!” Grief is impossible to ignore, and it has the power to untether us from the shackles of numbness, of coping, of anxiety laden determinism. In our grieving is our healing, our integration, our ability to molt the armor we wear to deflect the sharpness of dissonance. To grieve is to be hospitable to softness, to feel the full weight of love. The ache of grief reminds us we are a body, not just in a body.
The third gate of grief is the grief of separation. It is the grief that lives in our bodies, born of expectations forged by deep history yet undermined by the disorientation of modern life.
We live in what some call representational reality – a world of clocks and calendars that has completely abstracted our connection to the natural patterns of life and tempo of seasons. We live the same day over and over again, whether it’s the middle of June or the middle of December. Our holidays and festivals index on consumerism, not the connection to the earth and the dance of our solar system, the heat of the sun on our skin, the sweetness of the first summer strawberry, or the harvest of fall. We don’t wake with the sun and greet the moon as a community around a fire, sharing stories and staring at the stars. We have been ripped from origin and become global citizens. We rarely know or think of our ancestors beyond our parents’ parents all while nationalism expands the chasm of separation between peoples as a singular species. We live a fundamentally unconnected life, in a body that evolved in and for connection to others and the world around us.
Charles Eisenstein speaks to this as the “age of separation.” In his book ‘The Ascent of Humanity’ he aptly describes separation.
“The root and the epitome of separation is the discrete, isolated self of modern perception: the “I am” of Descartes, the “economic man” of Adam Smith, the individual phenotype of Darwinian competition for resources, the skin-encapsulated ego of Alan Watts. It is a self conditionally dependent on, but fundamentally separate from the Other: from nature and other people. Seeing ourselves as discrete and separate beings, we naturally seek to manipulate the not self to our best advantage.”
Our bodies ache for connection. But in western culture we’ve separated our mind and emotion from the body as distinct things – this is disembodiment. Our disembodiment is an anesthesia, a coping that numbs us to the grief of this isolation, this unmet need and expectation. This disembodiment is nefarious, it is also deeply entangled with our collective inability to solve the metasystemic crisis we face today as a species.
I want to take a moment here to unpack the connection between seperation and disembodiment. I want to tell you about numbers. This is going to feel a bit like a rabbit trail, but I promise I’ll bring it all back to the point of separation.
It wasn't until the enlightenment that myth, story, and metaphor surrendered its position as the primary orientation towards reality. It was then that evidence superseded imagination as the primary orientation towards understanding the world.
Underlying this new way of knowing was a new conception of 'numbers.' For thinkers of previous centuries, numbers represented a quality of something more so than a quantity. The philosopher Gary Lachman points out that for the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, "numbers had a metaphysical reality; they were symbols or expressions of certain qualities, certain fundamental characteristics or essences that provided the pattern and shape of reality. There was a quality of what we would call 'twoness' just as there was a quality of 'threeeness.'"
Numbers were understood like this for some time until the enlightenment when numbers would lead to what the 19th century philosopher Rene Guenon called the "reign of quantity." Numbers came to be primarily an agent of measurement. This shift from quality to quantity was a seismic shift in western civilization's relationship to the world, and had profound effects. This shift gave us the scientific revolution in which the quantification of experience imparted to civilization a new capacity for understanding and invention.
It also gave us the industrial revolution. In the late 1800s FW Taylor was the first to begin applying these scientific epistemologies to the world of work. With his pocket watch, he began to time activities of steelworkers to derive standards for productivity. Scientific management was born and today instead of pocket watches, we apply scientific management through the collection, organization, and analysis of data.
In business today, "data driven" as a term is so ubiquitous we don't even think twice about it, because data in this case is evidence. The data revolution of the last 25 years has further reinforced a way of knowing built on evidence. With the ability to understand the behaviors of our customers by measuring the ways they interact with our products, we have been able to create unprecedented wealth and scale.
Our business processes and paradigms have made evidence the hero, but we've also been given the mandate to innovate. In other words, we have been given the remit to grasp realities that are not immediately present – what 'could be,' while ingenuously collecting, organizing, and applying evidence towards what 'should be.' This is extremely difficult when enterprise dataism has created an environment where our hunches and intuitions are not welcome. We over index on data and in the process exile the dreaming part of us. The capacity to dream atrophies, and so we mourn; we grieve the loss of this part of ourselves.
To say it more succinctly, in a world in which everything must be measured, we carry grief for the loss of our capacity to dream, the difficulty in giving life to new ideas. We are aware of this to some extent. We want to dream. We want to actively participate in the emergent unfolding of the universe. We all carry grief for the unrealized possibility in ourselves, our communities, our businesses, and our world. Acknowledging this grief is the first step towards embodied knowing.
Dreaming of what could be begins with grieving what hasn’t been. In grief we embrace the self-permission to exist outside the tyranny of numbers and metrics – in this way, the falling apart in grief is actually the first step to becoming whole.
Grief has radically changed me. Today I feel more embodied, more in touch with intuition, comfortable with my emotions, connected to others, and empowered to dream. My work, my teams, and my leadership have all benefitted. I’m still an apprentice, yet more optimistic than ever about the expansion still waiting for me.
May you stand in the ache of your grief and let it become a teacher.
With love,
–Joel
For further learning, I can’t recommend the work of Francis Weller more – his book ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow,’ as well as recorded lectures and other resources can be found on his website.
Additionally, my colleague Jacob Simons and I recently caught up with The House of Beautiful Business to talk all things grief; we’ve created a Glossary for Generation Grief: a list of terms, ideas, concepts, and words that have helped us think about grief’s role in the contemporary workplace. These terms are here to inspire reflection on the world’s current emotional climate and let you consider how you fit into this sometimes melancholy time. The list can help you discuss grief with colleagues, managers, and friends and brainstorm ways that our employers and organizations can support the breadth of our complex selves and make new meaning in an era rife with loss.