The Nature of Loss

 

A few weeks ago, my patient based in India was travelling in Europe for a wedding. Between cities, the airlines misplaced his baggage. We had an online session on the fourth day of the lost baggage.

My patient was agitated and admitted he was obsessively checking online to locate his bags. He said he had bought a few essentials. Was there anything valuable in your bag, I asked. No, he said. He said he lived frugally but had a good pair of shoes.

In this way, an unplanned session on loss unfolded. What else have you lost in life, I asked. He thought and said not very much. I probed and asked him to think about loss of youth, loss of faith (in others), loss of love, trust, and so on and so forth. He was struggling with these losses, but didn’t see them as such.

The nature of loss was revealed to me in an article I read several years ago. A man lost his keys and was upset. His wife reminded him that he lost things very often, almost every day. But he didn’t think so. The article went on to list all the things we lose in our lives.

For most of us, loss usually means a loss of life, to be mourned. Lives of loved ones – our family members, extended family members and friends. People taken away from us. Loss.

But, like keys and lost baggage, we lose things every day. We don’t register this, seeing them as single incidences in our lives, unconnected phenomena.

For example, starting with the day we are on. We lose it by the next day. We lose the sun at night and the moon in the mornings. The leaves on trees fall and new ones take their place. We lose the water of rivers, which then comes back to us as rain.

We lose our minds, our tempers, our souls. Not only that, but we lose our hearing, sight, sense of smell. We lose our teeth. Our skin sheds, our hair turns grey, thins out, and falls. We lose our confidence. Loss.

We lose relationships, in friendship, marriage, in misunderstandings. Furthermore, we grieve for these losses and our inability to avoid them.  Every loss adds up and hurts us and results in fear of intimacy and shutting down our hearts. This hurts us further. Loss.

In Buddhism, the notion of impermanence is a powerful one; the idea that nothing stays, everything changes. We suffer because we expect things not to change. In some ways, change directs us to the notion of loss. And acceptance of this loss.

But what if we looked at a loss as something we might gain from? When we lose something, anything, we suffer. We probably get angry, and this stops us from being calm, and this prevents us from seeing the possibilities resulting from the loss. 

A baggage loss is highly inconvenient. I jokingly asked my patient if he went out and replaced anything with joy. He smiled.

What have you lost in your life?  #loss #gain #impermanence