Grief is Grief Like Love is Love
ON COMMON SENSE, PART I
GRIEF IS GRIEF LIKE LOVE IS LOVE
I am paying attention to the world, I am listening. And I feel what you feel: something is not right. We hold this in common. This is our common sense. We feel it. In our hearts, in our guts, in our bodies. Our “reasonable” fearful minds have taken over, and we have been in a centuries-long state of denial that our hearts are indeed broken. The trauma of slavery continues to weigh on the black community as the systems we support perpetuate unjust and inhumane policies; the demands of assimilation continue to strip individuals and communities of their cultural inheritance; and our addictions have made us disciples of accumulation despite our attempts to return to the sobriety of a more simple life.
Something is not right. I feel what you feel. This is the nature of common sense. As I listen, I hear numbers, statistics, facts, and platitudes hurled across the great political divide as our temperatures rise and our souls become more and more undernourished. Each side makes a claim on reason, confused at the non-sense coming from the other side. All of this feels unreasonable to me. Which is the first sign that grief is trying to surface in order to encourage us to surrender our fear and acknowledge the loss we all bear.
Grief is unreasonable. Grief “makes no sense” to our minds that are shaped by our individual experiences from our limited perspective. The only way to empathy is through listening deeply with the heart. Only the heart can understand grief--the mind wants things to be linear, to be obvious, to be predictable. There is no algorithm that predicts how loss will affect one person or another. And so, we must put aside our sacrosanct minds, and restore the holiness of the heart. Now would be a very good time for us to drop into the depths of common sense--where we might feel each other with generous compassion as we yield to the unreasonable rantings of grief. Below the surface of the rantings dwells a deep pain, a wound that we inherited and that has been infected with the denial of the loss of our ancestors as well as our own disappointments.
If we want empathy in this country and in this world, first we must descend into the heart of grief, leaving behind our shortsighted minds. Indeed it is the expanse of the heart that should lead the mind, not the other way round as we in the west have all been trained to do. Now is the time to invest in our hearts where compassion can grow, where common sense is felt and acknowledged. The mind cannot produce compassion or empathy, only the heart can. Our hearts have been sending signals to our minds that something is not right, and our minds cannot compute the pain and grief because the mind is unreasonable. And so, we must allow our hearts to lead and reclaim their rightful place as leader of our conscience.
It is easier to feel with people who have had similar experiences to ours because we were given the same set of equations that our minds can quickly understand. But our minds interfere when we interact with someone who has had a very different upbringing. Our minds have been trained into shapes and grooves that behave quite differently in some cases, and our equations in life are not the same. We do not make the same associations, the same connections. Our minds are not aligned, and it seems crazy to imagine that our minds will ever align. And so empathy cannot come from this place of mental conditioning, where dogma, not truth, dwells.
Love is Love. Grief is Grief.
Compassion and all universal truths live within the heart, not in the mind. Love is a universal truth. As is grief. Just as love often appears to be unreasonable to the mind (as we say, love is blind) so does grief. Grief, too, is blind. We love what and who we love; just as we grieve what and who we grieve. There’s rarely a linear explanation for either that will satisfy the rigidity of our minds. It is a curious thing that we say something “makes no sense” when it is merely unfathomable to our minds. Sense is born in the body, not in the mind.
Our minds have been trained to ignore our senses as we numb them with distractions, painkillers...and reason. We reason ourselves out of feeling almost constantly. Our overconfident minds become tyrannical bullies that push us to ignore our hearts and our bodies. The feelings, the sensations of our emotions often arrive unexpectedly and at inconvenient times as we push through a work day or check off a to-do list of accomplishments. When our feelings show up, we often shoo them away with explanations about their inconvenient timing, and, rather than stopping to listen to our feelings, we ignore them and eat a cookie instead. And this is how our minds get confused about feelings. Our minds rewire, and now we equate feeling sad or uninspired with being hungry. We’re not even aware of our own or anyone else’s grief because now we think our grief is a weakness that should be yelled at or rudely dismissed.
How do we realign our minds to our hearts? How do we learn to recognize and make room for grief? We begin to listen to feel, not to understand. We listen in compassion, not in logic. We listen all the way through to empathy, where we feel once again that grief is grief like love is love.
I am now coming to understand that when I say that something or someone “doesn’t make sense”, it is because I am trying to understand with my linear, rigid, and dogmatic mind. If I listen with my heart, and I begin to feel what they feel, while not getting distracted by their words, then I might begin to cultivate common sense. Then I might begin to feel with my neighbor again. We cannot explain with words why we love whom and what we love; and so we cannot explain why we grieve what or whom we grieve. Words get in the way as we have become evermore careless and simultaneously violent with our language. We usually speak from a defensive of shame rather than from an offensive of humility, of our shared humanity. And so since many of us are unpracticed in careful language, we must listen beyond the words and feel what another is really saying. We must listen through and beyond the words, down into the depths where the other soul is trying to find a way out. They might be speaking words of anger, but somewhere in there, they are feeling desperation, hopelessness, fear--they are grieving. If young boys do indeed tease a girl when they are actually in love with her, then perhaps we scream at each other when what we want most is to grieve; when we really just want to cry for no good reason. Except there is a reason--and only hearts will understand. We will grieve when we know that the listener is listening with her heart, not with her mind.
Eternal Human Truths
Our minds and biology evolve as culture and perspectives evolve. But the feelings of love and grief remain the same in our bodies. The particulars of what produces the feelings of love and grief is different for each individual, but the feeling is the same. The feeling is our common sense, not the reason of the mind which evolves and changes depending on where and when we live. Love and Grief remain unchanged as feelings, as a knowing, in the flesh. Love feels the same in me as it feels in you; grief feels the same in you as it feels within me. Yet we arrive at these feelings from different paths, from different experiences, from different beliefs, from different minds. Perhaps you arrived at the feeling of love when someone wrote you a note of affection, while I arrived at the feeling of love when someone listened to my questions. And perhaps you arrived at the feeling of grief at the end of summer, while I paradoxically arrived at the feeling of loss at the end of winter. Nevertheless, we arrived at the same place of feeling grief. Love is love. Grief is grief. I will meet you there. In the feeling. In the commons of sense and sensibility where our ability to sense comes alive.
